Posted By Ian Hutchings Dave, I have just e-mailed you directly regarding this. Regards, Ian Hutchings DNV Consulting

Posted By Jay Joshi Dave, As far as I am aware,no certification body in the world so far has obtained accreditation for OHSAS 18001 from a national accreditation body. UKAS in UK cannot do so because its MOU with DTI does not include it! There have been inputs from contributors to this forum on the background to OHSAS 18001 etc. I will e-mail it to you directly, as I do not want to repeat it here. I understand the Dutch & American accreditation bodies want to do so, but I doubt whether they have accredited any body so far. One of the main issues with OHSAS 18001 is that it is NOT an international standard, unlike its counterparts such as the ISO 14001 & ISO 9001. This is partly due to the "sensitivities" of the international standards process, even within ISO that is subject to "consensus" and voting by constituent members of ISO. BSI's proposals to ISO have not been carried forward on 2 occasions as there was an informal agreement that only ILO's Occupational Health & Safety "agency" ILO-Worksafe is the representative body that should do so. This has led to the publication of ILO-Worksafe guidelines on Occupational Health & Safety Management Systems for both national (i.e. country) level and organisation (i.e. company) level. In addition, the priorities of ILO-Worksafe are to address and support the implementation of all its conventions, recommendations etc in member countries. This makes sense because that is what is required in the developing countries that do not have a mature national occupational health & safety system. My personal view is that there is apprehension amongst some stakeholders that "certification" is primarily being pushed thro' by those who will profit from it etc. Also, there is genuine concern on the indirect domino/disproportionate effect it may have on small business should they be required to have certification just to be in the supply chain. Last, but not least, even in the publication of the British Standard, BS 8800, no consensus was reached on certification, hence it was published without lending itself to the certification process. It should be noted that both ISO 9001 & ISO 14001 were predominantly British Standards (BS 5750 & BS 7750) that could be certificated! Coming back to your question, my personal view is that it is one of the only "universal" OHSMS system adopted by certification bodies available --the other being proprietary audit systems used by ROSPA, BSC, Du Pont, ISRS etc. Most of the reputed certification bodies follow similar criteria for OHSMS audits as they do for the ISO 9001 & ISO 14001 series. This includes their auditor certification by IRCA. What you need to recognise is that as is the case with obtaining certification of any management system, there are advantages,disadvantages, costs attached and what you/your organisation wants to get out of it. The bottom line, I guess is that is it value for "money" for your organisation?

Posted By Merv Newman L'Association Française d'Assurance Qualité (AFAQ) the french association charged with accreditation to ISO 9000 and 14000 have informaed me that they are prepared to certify companies as being in conformance with hsas18000 and that they have done this a number of times since the beginning of 2001. However, they say that in practice they have more "auditors" than "auditees" Merv Newman