The 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 intended to raise awareness of:

• how promoting and creating a safety and health culture can help reduce
  the number of work-related deaths and injuries,
• the need to raise the political profile of occupational safety and health.

Occupational safety and health at NOTE
Improving employee safety, reducing workplace risks and creating better and safer working conditions are important parts of NOTE’s daily work. The plants in Finland, Estonia and China, as well as in Norrtälje, Sweden, also use ISO 45001 to guide their efforts. This far-reaching, global and verifiable occupational health and safety standard involves external auditing and certification. NOTE’s goal is that all plants will be ISO 45001 certified by 2022.

Setting the standard through international certification
Niklas Andreasson, Quality Manager of NOTE Norrtelje, shares his view on ISO 45001 and the process of getting the certification.

What are the benefits of ISO 45001?
“Having the certification ensures that our employees are safe, happy and healthy. It also means that we, just like the product owner, need to make sure that our subcontractors comply with the demands. In this way, it’s not possible to get production that is unsafe or unhealthy done by outsourcing to someone that’s not certified. By choosing a certified partner, this demand is much easier to fulfill.”

What are the most important lessons learned during the certification process?
“Controlling and ensuring compliance with the work environment rules is a huge task where a lot of text has to be reviewed and many considerations must be made.”

What tips would you give to others who will certify their business according to ISO 45001?
“I would say that good planning is essential, and a good GAP analysis makes the work easier. Another tip is to combine ISO 45001 with already existing documents, we have for example updated our Quality & environmental policy, which now also covers work safety.”

Read more about NOTE’s sustainability work at www.note-ems.com/en/sustainability

Source:
https://www.un.org/en/observances/work-safety-day