OHSAS 18001 and transition to ISO 45001

Answer:

Purpose of both ISO 45001 and OHSAS 18001 is to help organization establish occupational health and safety management system. Currently, only OHSAS 18001 is published while ISO 45001 is in development, so at this point organizations can only implement OHSAS 18001.

Once ISO 45001 is published (and this is expected in September 2017) organization will be able to choose between those two standards and tailor their system according to one or both of them. If you decide to implement OHSAS 18001 and later to make transition to ISO 45001, you will have to update your system in order to make it ISO 45001 compliant.

In this way you will do most of the work during implementation of OHSAS 18001 and later you will have to update the system and this wouldn't take too much time but it is hard to say at this point since the ISO 45001 is not published yet and we are n ot certain how much will it differ from OHSAS 18001. Given the experience with transition of ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 the changes between OHSAS 18001 and ISO 45001 will be between 10 and 30% so the transition wouldn't require some big effort.

For more information, see: First glance at ISO/DIS 45001 – How different is it from OHSAS 18001?https://advisera.com/18001academy/blog/2016/01/20/first-glance-at-isodis-45001-how-different-is-it-from-ohsas-18001/