Certification / Accreditation

ISO 45001 Occupational health and safety

ISO 45001 is the international standard for occupational health and safety management. It provides a structured way to prevent work-related injury and ill health and provide safe, healthy workplaces, putting worker consultation and participation at its centre, not just management commitment.

At its core, it’s about a hierarchy of controls for managing risk: eliminate the hazard, substitute, use engineering controls, use administrative controls, and only then rely on personal protective equipment. It replaced BS OHSAS 18001, the previous standard, which is now withdrawn.

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Who it’s for and what’s involved

Relevant if you are:

Any organisation with people at work, of any size or sector

Building an integrated system alongside ISO 9001 and ISO 14001

Supporting sector schemes such as Achilles or SSIP

Still referencing the withdrawn OHSAS 18001 standard internally

Achieving certification involves:

Identifying hazards and assessing risks and opportunities

Establishing genuine worker consultation and participation

Applying the hierarchy of controls

Passing an external certification audit

How Q! supports certification

Learning from incidents, not hiding them

We have implemented this standard across science, technology and industrial sectors, most often as part of an integrated system alongside ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. The real differentiator between a box-ticking system and one with committed leadership is rarely the paperwork. It is whether incidents and near misses get reported honestly and the organisation learns from them, rather than closing and filing them quietly.

Health and safety done with your workforce, not just to them.

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Mini FAQs

ISO 45001 was first published in 2018 and remains current, with no revision in progress. If your business still references the withdrawn OHSAS 18001 standard internally, even informally, that’s worth addressing.

Yes, and it commonly is. Quality, environmental and health and safety management under one system has become so standardised that most UKAS-accredited certification bodies routinely audit all three together in a single integrated audit.

Yes. ISO 45001 can support these supply chain schemes, which often draw on the same risk assessment and control framework.

It is the part most businesses underestimate. Worker participation has to be built into how hazards are identified and how audits are planned, not bolted on as a consultation exercise once decisions are already made. Done properly, it tends to surface risks that management would never have spotted alone.