Full Form of OHSAS
Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series
OHSAS Full Form is Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series. OHSAS is essentially a globally applied British Standard used for the purposes of occupational safety and health management systems. OHSAS exists for the purpose of helping different organizations positioned to demonstrate effective occupational safety and health performance. OHSAS is largely recognized as an effective management system. The importance of OHSAS is great, considering that organizations operating worldwide understand the need to operate and improve safety and health performance and do so in accordance with the well-established standard.
It is for this purpose we have OHSAS. Before the year 1999, there were a number of domestic standards and certification schemes which generated confusion and affected the credibility of various individual schemes. To do away with this deficit, OHSAS Project Group was created to come up with a single approach. OHSAS Project Group composed of representatives from various national standards bodies, accreditation bodies, occupational safety and health bodies, academic bodies and certification bodies, with the BSI Group (national standards body in the United Kingdom) providing the secretariat.
In the year 2007, the OHSASS 18001 specification was given up gradation. Among many changes incorporated, what was more striking is the close alignment with ISO 14000 and ISO 9000 so that the organizations are able to adopt easily the OHSAS 18001 standards alongside other prevailing management systems. In addition to that, the “health and safety” component was provided due emphasis. Later, the UK’s BSI Group announced the adoption of the OHSAS 18001 as British standard. The same group subsequently moved to the 180002 guidance specification as the BS OHSAS 18002 in the year 2008.
The OHSAS works in the following manner:
(1) It identifies safety and health risks.
(2) It aids in the compliance with the law.
(3) It works on the improvement of the health and safety mechanism prevalent.
(4) It tries to minimize any untoward incident relating to issues on health and safety.