At last, ISO approves the creation of a new project committee to develop an International Standard for occupational health and safety (OH&S). "ISO has approved the creation of a new project committee to develop an International Standard for occupational health and safety (OH&S). The work will be overseen by ISO Project Committee (PC) 283, Occupational health and safety management systems - Requirements. The secretariat of ISO/PC 283 has been assigned to BSI, the British Standards Institution, and its first meeting is expected to be held on 21-25 October 2013 in London, United Kingdom. The ISO project committee will be tasked with transforming OHSAS 18001 (the OH&S management system requirements) into an ISO standard. The ISO project committee will bring together experts and interested stakeholders in OH&S management. The committee's job will be to develop a standard following the generic management system approaches pioneered by the likes of ISO 9001:2008 for quality management or ISO 14001:2004 for environmental management and since applied to other objectives." http://www.iso.org/iso/h...e/news.htm?refid=Ref1766 http://www.iso.org/iso/i...committee?commid=4857129 It is great news. IOSH is represented on the BSI HS/1 Committee by Richard Jones, so it will have input to the UK response during the consultation phase. What pleases me even more is that IOSH is also applying for Category A Liaison status with ISO, so that IOSH can have a more direct input to the standard. http://www.iosh.co.uk/ne...s/from_ohsas_to_iso.aspx

The reason is that it has been an anomaly that we did not have an ISO (INTERNATIONAL) Standard for Occupational Health & Safety Management Systems and ended up with OHSAS 18001. If anything, OHSAS 18001 rather than ISO 9001 or 14001 will be referred to as a basis to start work from, but as mentioned in the ISO and IOSH press release, the ISO project committee will bring together experts and interested stakeholders in OH&S management. Unlike OHSAS 18001 that was primarily the certification Bodies and at a later stage the BSI HS/1 technical Committee, this will include consultation with ILO-Safework constituents (workers representatives). Regarding the comment another opportunity to make money, OHSAS 18001 will be phased out after an ISO Standard for Occupational Safety & Health that lends itself to certification is published. Also, it is up to organisations individually to decide whether they want to progress the certification route for true continuous improvement or not. Last but not least, it may increase the use of true Integrated Management Systems.

Hi Merv, The background to all this is that after the publication of International Standards in Quality and Environmental Management as ISO 9000 and 14000 series that had started life as British Standards BS 5750 and BS 7750 respectively, there was an attempt by BSI to do the same for Occupational Health & Safety Management Systems. This was after the publication of BS 8800:1996 that did not lend itself for certification. At ISO i.e. international level, 2 attempts by BSI to initiate work on an international standard for Health and Management Systems, in January 1997 and June 2000 did not materialise as the proposal did not get the requisite two-thirds of votes. • In January 1997, ISO's Technical Management Board (TMB) shelved the possibility of ISO developing OH&S standards along the lines of ISO 9000. At that time, the TMB noted that the outcome of the international workshop on OH&S management system standardization held by ISO on 5-6 September 1996 in Geneva indicated that there was little support from the main stakeholders for ISO to develop standards in this field. • In June 2000, for a BSI (British Standards Institution) proposal that ISO establish a technical committee to transform BS 8800, the British OH&S management system guidelines into an ISO standard, 29 members had voted in favour of the proposal, but 20 others had voted negatively. Under ISO rules, acceptance of such a proposal requires approval by two-thirds of the members voting. This is the second time that ISO has decided not to launch OHSMS work, the previous occasion being three years ago, after a consultation of stakeholders through a major international workshop. This ultimately led to the Global Certification Bodies in conjunction with BSI, publishing OHSAS 18001:1999 that was a termed as a "Specification" since it could not be termed as a "Standard". This was not accredited by any of the national accreditation bodies initially! In the fullness of time, OHSAS 18001:1999 became a de-facto international "standard" and a couple of national accreditation bodies, i.e. the Dutch and UK (UKAS) began accrediting OHSAS 18001:1999 for certification. This eventually led to the recognition of the revised OHSAS 18001:2007 by the BSI Technical Committee HS/1 as a "British Standard" and hence it designation as BS OHSAS 18001:2007 which was not the case with OHSAS 18001:1999 ! BS 8800:1996 was revised in 2006 and now BS 8800 is superseded by BS 18004:2008

Jay, thank you for that. I've been in France for all of that period so my understanding of the history is somewhat remote. I do remember that, at the time I got a copy of 8800, I had a moan at my boss that they were stealing our (Dupont) ideas. He smiled and said "we do work closely with them" (behind his back we called him "the lizard" but that's just nostalgia talking) Merv