Category: standards

Early WHS submissions are a mixed bag

The first lot of anonymous submissions to Australia’s Independent Review of Work Health and Safety Laws is an interesting mix.

One seems written by a regional paramedic calling for increased prescription of workplace first aid requirements. There are complaints about the contents of first aid kits which should have been addressed by the occupational health and safety (OHS) option of providing equipment to meet the results of a first aid needs analysis about which the submitter says:

“The recommendation to add additional items based on an appropriate risk assessment is almost, to my knowledge, never completed.”

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Quick and dirty summary of new OHS management Standard

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I really enjoyed presenting at the Central Safety Group’s monthly meeting yesterday*.  (Taught me not to use slide presentations if you can avoid it.). Here is a brief summary of my take on the new international Standard for OHS Management Systems – ISO45001 – that I shared with the group members. Continue reading “Quick and dirty summary of new OHS management Standard”

Hyperbole over new OHS Standard

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The hyperbole about ISO45001 keeps coming now that the International Standard for Occupational Health and Management Systems has been finalised and due for publication on March 18 2018.

On February 1 2018, Vic Toy, chair of the US technical advisory group is quoted in EHS Today:

“ISO45001 is one of the most significant developments in workplace safety over the past 50 years, presenting an opportunity to move the needle on reducing occupational health and safety risks…..

The goal was to create a widely accepted standard that can produce a highly effective safety and health management system for an increasingly interconnected world, regardless of an organisation’s size, location, supply chains or nature of work.  It becomes a minimum standard of practice, and a good one at that.”

ISO45001 does have great potential for change but primarily in those countries that have no such standard already and where OHS laws are under-developed or poorly enforced. Continue reading “Hyperbole over new OHS Standard”