An important requirement of OHSAS 18001 deals with complying with legal & other requirements. To fail to do so would put the health and lives of people at risk. The standard defines a framework to help you to identify and monitor how you comply with local legislation concerning occupational health & safety.
Before we’ll know how to comply, we have define to legal compliance. Complying with legal requirements needs complete implementation of all occupational health & safety laws applicable. When the legal requirements have all been met and the desired changes have been achieved, your organization will be deemed compliant.
Legal requirements are mentioned in various places in the standard.
Policy
The ISO 18001standard specifies that you should include a pledge that you will comply with legal & other requirements relating to OHSAS hazards as a minimum when creating the policy.
Identifying legal & other requirements
Although it is not a requirement that you document the procedure to identify and access the legal & other requirements, its goal is to make sure that you consider all applicable legal & other requirements when you establish, implement and maintain your OHSAS management system. For this, you only need to create a list of legal & other requirements and update it regularly.
When you design a procedure to identify and access the legal & other requirements applicable to your organization, occupational health & safety regulations may be found on the website of government agencies, or by using other specialized services. Use only regulations that are applicable to your business.
Objectives
While implementing the system, the organization should have mechanisms in place for dealing with legal requirements. These could include documents to show compliance, responsibilities and authorities for relevant requirements, a communication process and training and awareness of the processes relating to compliance.
An organization should plan how it will comply with legal requirements. If you discover that you only comply with a specific applicable regulation to some extent, or you have completely omitted it during identification of applicable legal requirements, you should immediately plan to become fully compliant.
Evaluating compliance
Compliance with legal & other requirements needs to be evaluated periodically, as being compliant today does not mean this will still be the case in 6 or 12 months. This is mandatory and you must keep a record as evidence.
When non-compliance with a legal requirement is discovered, it is a requirement that the organization take immediate corrective action. This action may have to include actions to inform the authorities immediately depending on the specifics of the legal requirement and the size of the non-compliance. As with any nonconformity, the procedure for corrective actions should be followed.
Review
The OHSAS management representative should keep top management informed on the evaluation of compliance and changes in any legal requirement. This is normally done through the management review process and ensures that management knows about the risks of actual or potential non-compliance, Management should also take appropriate steps rectify the situation. One of the compulsory inputs to the management review process is evaluation results of compliance with legal & other requirements.
Many organizations have achieved and maintained legal compliance because they implemented an ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) using MyEasyISO in Melbourne (Australia), and ISO 14001 & OHSAS 18001 Health Safety Management Systems (HSE) in Hong Kong (China)
