OHSMS Working Group

The charter of the Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OHSMS) Working Group is to:

• Identify and implement focused outreach efforts related to OHSMS standards, particularly in the areas of international adoption and harmonization of existing or proposed international and domestic standards
• Encourage and facilitate the implementation and utilization of Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems
• Develop tools to support these OHSMS outreach efforts

To achieve its charter, the OHSMS Working Group is comprised of three project teams.

The first project team is focused on providing input into the current international revision of Occupational health and safety management systems – Guidelines for the implementation of OHSAS 18001. OHSAS 18002 is being revised to align it with the changes made to OHSAS 18001. AIHA hosted the international meeting of the OHSAS Working Group in October 2007 to produce the first working draft of OHSAS 18002.

This project team helped develop comments to the revised OHSAS 18001 standard. Many of these comments lead to changes to OHSAS 18001 to more closely align it with ANSI/AIHA Z10. OHSAS 18001 was published as a final standard in July 2007.

The second project team is focused on revising ANSI/ASQ 19011S with the goal of broadening the coverage of this management system auditing standard to include OHSMS audits. This project team is composed of members from AIHA, AIH, ASSE, ABIH and BCSP. 

This work is an extension of the work done in 2005 that resulted in the development of a position paper: Auditor Competency for Assessing Occupational Health & Safety Management Systems.

The third project team is developing specific actions to promote the use of ANSI/AIHA Z10. These activities involve the development of products, such as publications, as well as conducting outreach activities to promote the use of management system standards for occupational safety and health.