Occupational Health & Safety Management Systems

What is ISO 45001?

ISO 45001:2018 is the international standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems. It replaced OHSAS 18001 as the recognised framework for managing workplace health and safety risks — reducing incidents, protecting employees and contractors, and demonstrating a systematic, proactive approach to safety governance.

If your organisation still holds OHSAS 18001 certification, it should already have transitioned to ISO 45001 — the OHSAS standard was officially withdrawn in March 2021. If you have not yet made that transition, Anacruses can help.

Who needs ISO 45001?

• ◆Construction, engineering, civil and rail businesses where H&S is assessed in pre-qualification questionnaires
• ◆Facilities management, utilities and infrastructure organisations
• ◆Manufacturing businesses with significant machinery, chemical or physical hazards
• ◆Any organisation tendering for contracts where safety performance is evaluated
• ◆Businesses that want to move beyond legal compliance to proactive safety leadership
• ◆Organisations that have experienced incidents or near-misses and want a structured improvement framework

What ISO 45001 requires

ISO 45001 goes beyond simply documenting health and safety procedures. It requires organisations to demonstrate a systematic approach to identifying hazards and assessing risks, engaging workers in safety governance, setting measurable H&S objectives, and driving continual improvement in safety performance. Leadership commitment is explicitly required — this standard cannot be delegated entirely to a safety officer.

How Anacruses helps

We begin with a gap analysis against the ISO 45001 requirements — reviewing your existing H&S arrangements, documentation, and incident records. We then build or enhance your Occupational Health and Safety Management System, covering hazard identification, risk assessment, legal register, objectives, competence records, emergency procedures, and audit programme.

Typical implementation timeline: 10–16 weeks. Transition from OHSAS 18001 to ISO 45001 is typically faster — 6–10 weeks.

Integrating ISO 45001 with your other standards

ISO 45001 shares the same Annex SL high-level structure as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001. If you hold either of those standards — or are implementing them alongside ISO 45001 — a significant proportion of your management system can be integrated. An Integrated Management System covering quality, environment and health and safety is increasingly common in construction, engineering and manufacturing, and Anacruses has delivered a number of these.