ISO 45001 certification for occupational health and safety, from $800

Safety law and local conditions

We audit ISO 45001 for clients in the USA, Europe, Asia and Africa. The standard is the same everywhere, but your legal requirements are not. In the USA, OSHA rules and state plans set the baseline. In Europe, national laws based on EU directives define risk assessment duties, and in other regions local labour and safety laws apply.

ISO 45001 requires you to identify the laws that apply to your sites, to keep up with changes and to evaluate compliance regularly. During the audit we sample that evaluation: inspection certificates for lifting equipment and pressure vessels, fire safety checks, occupational health surveillance where required, and training records.

For projects and temporary sites, such as construction or installation work, we agree with you which locations are sampled so the certificate reflects the real work.

Language matters too. If the workforce speaks a language other than the one the documents are written in, the auditor checks that safety instructions and training reach people in a language they understand.

Where several companies share a site, such as a contractor working inside a client plant, the auditor checks how responsibilities are split: who controls access, who issues permits and who leads in an emergency.

What the audit day looks like

The auditor will talk to workers, not only to the safety manager. Expect questions such as how they report a near miss, what they do if they see an unsafe situation, and how they were involved in the last risk assessment. ISO 45001 puts weight on worker consultation and participation, and the auditor needs evidence that it happens.

Expect the auditor to ask to see a permit to work, a recent toolbox talk, or a lockout in progress if one is planned. Practical evidence like this shows that procedures are used at the point of work, not only stored in a folder.

Incidents are reviewed as well. If an accident happened in the last year, the auditor checks the investigation, the root cause and whether the corrective action worked. Findings are graded as major or minor, and certification is decided on the evidence. You receive a written report with every finding explained.

After certification and moving from OHSAS 18001

Keep risk assessments under review when work, equipment or people change, keep consulting workers, run internal audits and hold management reviews. Surveillance audits look at these, together with incident statistics and any enforcement action since the last visit.

Use your performance data. Lost-time injuries, near-miss reports, inspections completed and actions closed on time are the indicators surveillance auditors ask about most, and a trend over the year tells more than a single number.

If you still run a system built for OHSAS 18001, the main additions in ISO 45001 are the context of the organization, stronger leadership duties, worker participation, the hierarchy of controls and planning for change. We review the gaps at Stage 1 so you know exactly what to update.

Like other ISO management system standards, ISO 45001 was amended in 2024 to ask whether climate change is a relevant issue for your organization. The auditor will check that you considered it.