Has anyone observed or read any case studies of benefits of integrating health and safety into an EMS? I know NASA has VPP and ISO 14001 but it seems that they approach them as completely separate. Do you know anyone who has achieved great results by combining them? Any information or direction would be greatly appreciated. -randy

Welcome to the Cove. We have had several discussions in the past month or so about health, safety and environmental combined systems. If you perform a search I am sure that you find a lot of info, plus you will be able to share with us in those discussions. If you do not find what you are looking for, let us know there are a lot of really great resources here! :bigwave:

I have never done all 3 personally but googling for "integrated management system" should bring up some good results for you.

The following are case studies on the LRQA (a british registrar) website and will hopefully be useful to you:

http://www.lrqa.co.uk/guidance/casestudies/northumberland/
http://www.lrqa.co.uk/guidance/casestudies/atkins/
http://www.lrqa.co.uk/guidance/casestudies/clancy/print.asp

Good luck

Has anyone observed or read any case studies of benefits of integrating health and safety into an EMS? I know NASA has VPP and ISO 14001 but it seems that they approach them as completely separate. Do you know anyone who has achieved great results by combining them? Any information or direction would be greatly appreciated. -randy

I am always a great fan of combining Health and safety into EMS; ie OHSAS 18001 and ISO 14001. Search through this forum and you will get some good stuff.

I work for 2 registrars and have a number of clients that I audit who have added health and safety to an existing ISO 14001 certified EMS. Of course, the equivalent to that is implementing OHSAS 18001 (or ANSI Z10), piggy-backed onto an EMS. Once you build the EMS, you can add occupational health and safety to the environmental policy (or make it separate), legal and other requirements, internal audits, evaluation of compliance, control of documents and records, monitoring and measurement, operational controls, and management reviews. Perhaps the most unique portion of an occupational health and safety management system is the focus on hazards and risks (similar to the focus in ISO 14001 on environmental aspects and impacts).

One example on the web is the EMS and OHSMS at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Lab. They started with ISO 14001 implementation for one function or research facility at a time and then added OHSAS 18001 implementation. Their EMS and OHSMS manuals are available online.

Many systems that I have seen have started with ISO 9001 implementation and have added in ISO 14001 and occupational health and safety later.

Brent Smith

As a company, we have been very successful with our combined 18001 and 14001 programs. Accidents have been reduced along with cost. We have a global policy with Environment, Health and Safety combined.