The Support Resources Required for ISO 45001

ISO 45001 Requirement: To be a truly effective Occupational Health and Safety management system, ISO 45001 cites specific areas to which resources must be allocated.

The Key Requirements are outlined on this page.

Recognizing that any endeavor needs the proper level of resources to succeed, ISO 45001 specifically lists types, levels and key measures of the needed resources to maintain compliance including:

The standard wants a program for determining what support will be needed and how this will be provided including:

• Who will be assigned to execute each phase and how these people will be empowered
• Determine both what may threaten the execution of the process (see OH&S risk analysis), and what benefits may come from proper process execution
• Documenting the process properly, including updates, and making it available to all involved

Section 7 Support

Section 7.1: Resources

This section takes a broad view of items needed to realize the requirements of ISO 45001, specifically calling for support in these critical areas:

• What resources on hand vs. what needs to be procured including
  • labor/skills
  • plant or office facilities/utilitie
  • information technology/communications
  • transportation/logistic
  • equipment
  • working conditions (including physical and interpersonal emotional, intellectual, and motivational issues)
• Measuring the type, level, scope, continuity, and suitability of resources including ongoing justification of the need for these, and recording the results of this tracking
• Addresses automated measurement for areas such as production data acquisition, asking that its accuracy be verified, documented, made tamper-proof and secure
• What information is needed by the organization to maintain intended health and safety output including that a plan be made on how information (i.e. data, procedures/approaches, etc.) be categorized, preserved and shared – and that any gaps in knowledge be understood and addressed?

For more information, read Resources needed.

Section 7.2: Competence

The aptitude of those who implement the health and safety plan needs to be assessed against the requirements for the tasks, and any deficiencies be addressed through personnel training, exposure, outsourcing or reassignment.

For more information, read Training requirements

Section 7.3: Awareness

The standard requires that everyone, not just those who administer the OH&S system, become familiar with its policies and objectives and know what they must do to achieve its goals, including what happens if they don’t adequately meet these requirements. Employee awareness of health and safety issues results from effective training of personnel – see Training Requirements

Section 7.4: Information and Communication

A formal plan and activities for providing internal and external information relevant to the OH&S management system need to include:

• What information will be communicated?
• When will the information be communicated?
• Who needs to know about each specific plan element?
• How and when that communication will take place?
• And who is responsible to control and transmit the information?

Internal communication needs to ensure that the health and safety information, including changes to the OH&S system is communicated at all levels and functions, and permits workers to make contributions to continual improvement.

External communication needs to ensure that the views of external interested parties are considered and take into account legal requirements.

Training and awareness of personnel as required in above sections 7.2 and 7.3 will go a long way in enhancing the internal and external communication of health and safety matters as required in this section 7.4.

Address your training, awareness, information and communication needs with:

• ISO 45001 Employee Training
• Introduction to ISO 45001 This presentation reviews each section of the standard and has student guides and quizzes to measure the effectiveness of the training.

Section 7.5: Documented Information

The nature of documented information has become a lot more flexible and manageable in order to both meet that which is required by the standard, but also what is needed by the organization itself to practically implement the OH&S.

For more information, read Documented Information

The standard notes that the extent of that documentation will vary based on a variety of factors (i.e. size, mission, products, services, sophistication, etc.). It also provides for the specific documentation criteria:

• It must include a means for proper description, including its source, purpose, change history, review/approvals and the method of communicating (text, audio, video, pictorial, multimedia, interactive, etc.).
• A means must be provided to formally manage the documentation while balancing the need for access versus security.
• Going further, there must be a plan and approach governing documentation dissemination (what, when, and where documentation can be accessed and by whom), integrity/validation, revision, approval, storage, and disposal.

For more information, read Documentation Retention

For more information, read Control Procedure 

Please note that certain text from the ISO 45001 standard is only used for instructional purposes. Standard Stores recognizes and respects the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) copyright and intellectual property guidelines.