The ISO 45001 standard is the framework for a secure working environment for employees, which has proven to promote the prevention of work-related accidents and injury globally. The implementation of the Occupational Health and Safety Management System based on ISO 45001 is intended to establish a guideline for hazard identification and risk assessment at the workplace. This approach provides your employees and organization with a secure working environment that prioritizes the principle of prevention, through the identification of potential risk factors.
The health and safety of your employees should be a moral and not just legal obligation and ensure a secure and risk-free environment that protects your contractors, management and visitors who may enter the public or private working space of your organization. Being ISO 45001 demonstrates that your organization is capable of raising awareness for concerns involving the safety of individuals who enter or are engaged in work within the premises of a hazardous occupational workspace. The OHSMS establishes a working environment that provides a high sense of responsibility that will assure appropriate behavior and guidelines to protect employees’ well-being.
The ISO 45001 certification has shown growth within organizations interested in promoting a safer and healthier environment for working employees.
How Does ISO 45001 Help Reduce Risks
According to the ISO 45001 standard, the OHSMS is methodically structured to manage and reduce risks efficiently through a systematic approach that analyzes the negative and positive effects of the organization’s risk operations. Through implementing the ISO 45001 standard organizations may gain the benefits of realizing the reduction in the number of incidents, better employee retention and much more in terms of lower insurance premiums. By taking action and utilizing this system you can secure the health and safety of your employees, while benefiting from significant investment in time and resources towards decreasing unnecessary and potentially harming risks while increasing the rewarding risks which are earned from this plan.
Hazard Identification Risk Assessment & Risk Control
Following this 3 step guide is crucial when developing an effective control of measures to manage health and safety at work.
- The Hazard Identification process is the first step, which involves identifying a source or situation that could lead to potential harm in terms of damage property, environment or human harm from undesired events.
- The Risk Assessment process is the second step that consists of the evaluation, description and quantification of the risks that are associated from the detected hazard. It is a key process of defining the probability, frequency and severity associated with hazardous substances, processes, actions or events, which are categorized as a high or low reasonable risk level.
- The Risk Control process is the third and final step that focuses on documenting the identified risk and providing the procedures and control measures taken to manage the hazard. The record keeping of the documented management process is required in order to confirm that the process has been conducted properly.
These crucial steps are very important when creating a systematic framework that can identify, control and prevent risk work-related injuries
Risk Management
The utmost important part of risk management within an organization is the implementation of a structured system that provides a consistently efficient and updated health and safety procedures towards your methods of planning. These three processes are the planned actions that will make sure that your risk management system is efficient:
Plan Actions: Decide whether the risk will be reduced or eliminated. You have to determine based on the plan of action whether the risk isn’t secure enough to provide safety in the working environment.
Prepare for Emergencies: If, however, you cannot eliminate or reduce a risk by changing the process you currently have in place, then having further back-up plans in place will help to deal with situations that arise unexpectedly.
Integrate actions into your processes: After taking action and deciding on the controls needed as part of your plan, it is necessary to integrate these controls into your processes.
Summary
To summarize this article about health and safety at work, implementing the Occupational Health and Safety Management System based on ISO 45001 is crucial to increase the protection of your working environment, reducing organizational risk and improving employee motivation. The ISO 45001 standard is an important framework for organizations that are interested in implementing and maintaining an Occupational Health and Safety Management System, which would ensure the safety of their employees that work in difficult hazardous environments. Promoting the importance of securing a preventable risk management system is essential towards identifying potential risk factors that affect your employee’s hazardous workplaces and reducing the chances of dangerous events. The future of establishing a framework that prevents accidents, fatalities and diseases globally is a challenge worth fighting for when it comes to protecting the health and safety of our employees.
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