OHSAS 18001

Maintenance of occupational health and safety has important human aspect, which presents the ethics and social level of organisation. Increasing of safety and occupational health has important economic meaning because solving of questions connected with occupational and safety management system, with creation of favourable working conditions and working relations bring optimisation of a working process with positive economic effect.
Economic advantages:

Higher productivity and working quality
Minimising of fees and penalties in occupational health and safety performance

Relations to employees:

Improvement of working conditions for workers
Increasing of satisfaction and loyalty of workers

Advantages for organisation management:

A tool for information obtaining important for planning and objectives establishment
Risk minimising of accidents and occupational diseases
Increasing of organisation ethics

The co-operation result of several accreditation and certification organisations all over the world there is creation of International Standard OHSAS 18001 – Occupational health and safety management systems. This set guideline of occupational health and safety management assessment (OHSAS) specifies requirements for occupational healthy and safety management system to enable to manage risks of OH&S management system and to improve its efficiency.

The guideline OHSAS is effective/applicable for each organisation, which intends to certify its OH&S management system. A certified organisation is qualified to use a certification mark for certified scopes.


Certificate OHSAS 18001		Certification mark OHSAS 18001

New standard OHSAS 18001:2007

QSCert considers important to inform its customers about issue of new standard OHSAS 18001:2007, which substitutes the old standard OHSAS 18001:1999. On the present there is a transition period, during which both standards are valid. The transition period finishes on 1st July 2009. After this date all certificates issued according to standard OHSAS 18001:1999 become invalid.

How QSCert shall proceed?

At first QSCert shall obtain the accreditation according to the new standard. While this standard is relatively new, there is no official version in the Slovak Republic. It is expected that SÚTN shall issue the standard in May 2008. At the same time in May 2008 QSCert shall make a request for accreditation according to the new standard. We assume that accreditation according to OHSAS 18001:2007 QSCert shall obtain until the end of August 2008.

How shall QSCert customer proceed, who has valid certificate according to OHSAS 18001:1999 at present?

Customers who have certificate according to the old standard shall adapt their system to the requirements of OHSAS 18001:2007 at latest by the end of August 2008 (or to the date of surveillance audit). After this date in the term of the proper surveillance audit QSCert shall realize examination of requirements compliance according to the new standard and in the case of positive audit result QSCert shall replace the certificate issued according to the old standard by the certificate issued according to OHSAS 18001:2007 with the same expiry date. In a case that the customer does not manage to adapt its system to the requirements of the new standard by the end of August 2008 (or until the date of proper surveillance audit), he shall do so at latest until May 2009 to enable QSCert to plan and execute short-notice surveillance audit. Certificate issued according to OHSAS 18001:1999 becomes invalid on 1st July 2009.