World Day for Safety and Health at Work
The annual World Day for Safety and Health at Work on 28 April promotes the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases globally. It is a campaign that aims to raise awareness of:
- how promoting and creating a safety and health culture can help reduce work-related deaths and injuries,
- the need to raise the political profile of occupational safety and health.
NOTE's work on safety and health
Improving employee safety, reducing workplace risks and creating better and safer working conditions are key elements of NOTE's day-to-day work. NOTE's plants in Finland, Estonia and China, and in Norrtälje, Sweden, also use ISO 45001 as a guideline in their work. This comprehensive, global and verifiable standard on health & safety includes external auditing and certification. NOTE's target is for all plants to be ISO 45001 certified by 2022.
Setting the standard through international certification
Niklas Andreasson, Quality Manager at NOTE Norrtelje, shares his views on ISO 45001 and the process of gaining certification.
What are the benefits of ISO 45001?
"Having the certification ensures that our employees are safe, happy and healthy. It also means that, just like the product owner, we have to ensure that our subcontractors fulfil the requirements. This way, it is not possible to have unsafe or unhealthy production carried out by outsourcing it to a non-certified supplier. By choosing a certified partner, this requirement is much easier to fulfil."
What are the main lessons learnt from the certification process?
"Checking and ensuring compliance with health and safety rules is a huge task where a lot of text has to be scrutinised and many considerations have to be made."
What tips would you give to others who are about to certify their organisation to ISO 45001?
"Good planning is crucial, and a good GAP analysis helps. Another tip is to combine ISO 45001 with existing documents, for example we have updated our quality and environmental policy, which now also includes occupational safety."
Read more about NOTE's sustainability work at https://www.note-ems.com/hallbarhet
Source:
www.un.org/en/observances/work-safety-day
