Ever wonder why there are so many different standards and guidelines for development of a health and safety management system? First, its become imperative to the success of any company to actually develop an OSH system. At the very least, it provides something to look to, to benchmark against, to evaluate.
However, why are there so many different ones? Let’s look at a few of them:
There are more than three similarities between these standards. The initial three that are clearly common threads are:
• All three take a comprehensive management system approach to managing safety and health in the workplace and yet are written to be easily tailored to a specific organization.
• All three include four basic tenets of effective safety management: management commitment, employee involvement, hazard analysis and safety and health training.
• All three are voluntary, performance based standards.
There are many differences between these three standards, some clear ones are:
• The OSHA and ANSI standards are written for and by the USA, whereas OHSAS 18001 was written by organizations representing Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain, and other international organizations.
• The ANSI and OHSAS standards are founded on the continuous improvement technique of “Plan, Do, Check, Act” model. The OSHA standard is not based on any continuous improvement model.
• The OSHA standard is quite old compared to the other two. It was created in a time where safety was more of a policing role rather than a risk management role. Therefore, the OSHA standard is more in a tone of compliance, the other two standards are much more like toolkits to help organizations.
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