Page 54 - Occupational Health & Safety, December 2018

STANDARDS
Dollars and Sense: The Business Case for Safety Management Systems
ISO 45001 and the revised ANSI/ASSP Z10 SMS Standard will help safety profes- sionals make the case to executive leadership that integrating safety and health into existing business management systems is both financially prudent and in- creasingly feasible to achieve.
BY TODD GROVER
There is a lot of interest in professional circles concerning a systems-based approach to managing the big picture of occupational safety and health, especially since the release of the ISO 45001 Global Health and Safety Manage- ment Standard in March 2017. This new standard de- fines an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) as a set of interrelated or interact- ing elements of an organization to establish policies, objectives, and processes with the intended outcome
of preventing injury and ill health to workers and to provide safe and healthy workplaces. The promise of a brand-new and integrated methodology involving top management, every worker in the organization, and other stakeholders in a well-organized and ongoing effort to identify and control workplace risks is under- standably appealing. And while there is a lot to be said for this globally harmonized version of protecting people, as well as the companies they work for, similar concepts have been around for many years.
50 Occupational Health & Safety | DECEMBER 2018
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