Good health and safety performance is no accident. Organisations should attach the same importance to achievement of high standards of OH&S management as they do to other key aspects of their business activities. This demands the adoption of a structured approach to the identification of hazards and evaluation and control of work related risks.

BS 8800 was published as a guide for an OH&S Management System in May 1996. This is guidance standard and is not designed to be certificatable.  Following demand for certification against the system the Certification Bodies produced OHSAS 18001 in 1999 and offer certification against it.  OHSAS is not an official standard and certification is not accredited by the national accreditation bodies.  However having external assessment of the system lends it credibility.

Organisations do not operate in vacuum.   Several parties have a legitimate interest in an organisation's approach to OH&S including: employees; customers/clients/suppliers; the community; shareholders; contractors; insurers; as well as the enforcement agencies. These interests need to be recognised.

Every working day in Great Britain two people are killed and over 6000 are injured at work. Every year three quarters of a million people take time off work because of what they regard as work-related illness. Around 31 million work days are lost as a result.

Official statistics of work related accidents and ill-health do not represent the full extent of pain and suffering that each event brings to its victims, their families, colleagues and friends. In addition to the human cost, occupational accidents and ill-health impose financial costs to individuals, employers and society at large. They can also kill or cripple companies because, in addition to the costs of personal injuries, they may incur far greater costs of damage to property or equipment, and lost production. Only a small proportion of these are recoverable from insurance. Management control of health and safety is essential and is particularly important in smaller firms where fatal and major injury rates tend to be higher (up to 40%) and the losses from a major accident can ruin the company.

Studies indicate that the overall cost to employers of personal injury work accidents, work related ill-health and avoidable non-injury accidents is estimated to be equivalent to around 5% to 10% of all UK companies' gross trading profits. One study showed that uninsured costs from accidental loss were between 8 and 36 times greater than the costs of insurance premiums. There are, therefore, sound economic reasons for reducing work related accidents and ill-health, as well as ethical and regulatory reasons. Besides reducing costs, effective OH&S management promotes business efficiency.

A comprehensive legal framework exists for occupational health and safety, requiring organisations to manage their activities in such a way as to anticipate and prevent circumstances that may result in occupational injury or ill-health.  Better control of operations in line with legal requirements contribute to improved business performance.

Directors and managers can be held personally responsible for failures to control health and safety. An OH&S system will help to keep your staff at work and reduce the costs of injuries, illness, property and equipment damage. There will be fewer production stoppages, higher output, and better quality. By complying with the law and avoiding fines damaging publicity can be avoided.

The system is intended to assist organisations to develop an approach to management of OH&S in such a way as to protect employees and others whose health and safety may be affected by the organisation's activities.

The OHSAS 18001 specification is based upon the general principles of good management and is designed to enable the integration of occupational health and safety (OH&S) management with an overall management system.

The specification allows OH&S to be based upon the environmental management system ISO 14001 to allow full integration of the two systems.

The approach used in BS EN ISO 14001 is risk-based, using a similar logic to that used in OHSAS 18001.  The many commonalties existing between them enable the systems to be integrated or aligned if an organisation is contemplating setting up management systems in these two key business areas.  This reduces the need for duplication and bureaucracy and, in some, it will reduce the risk of conflict.  For instance, it is quite possible for the control measures implemented to manage an OH&S risk to pose environmental management risks.

The 'Plan, Do, Check, Act' model of BS EN ISO 14001, together with the comparable clause headings of the two standards, are given below.