Posted By Alec Wood That depends on the nature of the non-conformance, and to a degree on the auditor. The implementation of the standard allows for immature systems. No setup is perfect, and some deficiencies will almost always be found. Deficiencies will be ranked as observations, improvement notes or non-conformances. Non-conformances will stop you getting the standard, improvement notes will be checked at the next surveillance visit, and observations are just comments. A huge stack of improvement notices may stop you getting the standard too. Most auditors do a stage one visit. This is less in depth than the full audit but will highlight many of the issues. In our case the issues in stage one pointed us to others so that by the time of the full audit we had closed all our gaps, or so we thought! Anyway, we ended up with one improvement notice for an issue we were in the process of sorting out, but our progress had not been recorded as required by our own procedures, so we couldn't demonstrate it. Having been given only twelve weeks from inception to audit we felt we had done pretty well. All such standards have internal auditing at their core. If you have a problem, then "find" it in an internal audit and run it through your normal corrective action procedures. If it is not finished by the tiome of the audit, you can use the ongoing activity to demonstrate the effectiveness of your internal auditing. There are some good OHSAS18001 specific internal auditing courses available and are well worthwhile doing.

Posted By Stuart Nagle Simon. As I am doing the same, I would tend to agree with both respondents, but of course there is nothing to stop you doing your own audit as a 'benchmarking' excercise to see where you are and where you've got to get to. This also enables the opportunity to set your own non conformities, and if supported by senior management, in the systems created for the audit (which you should have done already), then it requires those areas to be actioned to achieve conformity, yeah... So get your own audit system going, get the problems fixed by applying your own non compliances, and when this is achived and the when the non compliances raised are closed out, completed, whoopee dee.... go for external validation and see what happens then... Its got to be a better option - no external costs, complies with the system your going to operate, gets all those in the system in the way of it and enables you to demonstrate to those external to the organisation, such the validation team that will inevitably arrive, that you've got it all in hand... there... no problem .....!!!!!! Stuart