Rank: New forum user 
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We are aiming to acheive ISO 45001 accreditation in our UK and Ireland offices. The aim is to eventually roll this out to our offices in the Middle East too. Does anyone know if we require separate procedures for the Middle East or if we use British law, would this cover the ME over and above and therefore be sufficient?
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Rank: Super forum user 
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We use the same procedures, but they have mechanisms written in for local variation / rules. Depending on your situation it might be easier to have a country-specific procedure. Writing one-size-fits-all procedures becomes more involved, because although UK H&S law is mostly to a higher requirement than local law, there are some local requirements that are not part of UK law. Mandatory breaks during the hottest part of the day if working outdoors, for example - that's not a feature of UK H&S law, it is at some times of year in some parts of the Middle East. Therefore, your procedures need to have a means of accomodating local variation. Also, you will need management buy-in to the fact that you could be imposing costs on the business that don't have statutory requirements - our non-UK non-EC offices still do DSE workstation risk assesments for exmple, and we pay for staff eye tests. Maybe your business won't want those costs. There is more that you won't want to do - not much call for winter coats so your procedures probably need to not say 'all staff shall be issued with ... winter coat'
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Rank: Super forum user
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Hi Lisa Suggest you need to do a gap analysis between the legal requirements in whichever part(s) of the Middle East and the standards you apply in UK and RoI. Clearly if there is a requirement in the Middle East that DOESN'T apply in the UK or RoI then you need to decide how to respond to that - whether by a separate process, or perhaps some variant on what you do elsewhere - just as you probably do for a few things to reflect the minor variations in what the law requires in GB, NI and RoI - as a very simple example, if you have construction projects some of them will be notifiable. But the rules on the process for notifications is slightly different in three legislative regimes and you would soon get some egg on your face if you notified a project in RoI to the HSE in Great Britain!! Then, if the standards required in the Middle East are lower than those in the UK and Ireland you have to make a decision as to whether to go for a higher standard in the ME than elsewhere - not atypical for organisattions operating in multiple geographies to opt for a global approach that reflects e.g. US OSHA, EU or UK standards as the benchmark. ....and you might end up deciding on some hybrid where you have universal requirements supplemented by geographic variants for some aspects of HSE management. The art, I suggest, is to avoid making processes unnecessarily prescriptive.
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