We have recently been externally audited and one area of concern was the lack of inclusion of health and safety in our internal audit for 9001:2008. Being a good little doobie, I have taken upon myself to take ownership of integrating this into our existing QMS.

I am looking for opinions on what to include/exclude in our audit.

Obvious inclusions are:

4.2.3 Control of documents
4.2.4 Control of records
6.2.2 Competence, awareness and training
6.3 Infrastructure
6.4 Work environment

People are trained and expected to be competent and aware in the field of H and S. The infrastructure and work environment are inspected regularly to ensure compliance with the OHSA. Both of these create records and documents that need to be maintained and controlled.

Am I missing anything here?

Suggestions are welcomed as to what you would include, or if you already audit this process - what you do include.

Many thanks.

We have recently been externally audited and one area of concern was the lack of inclusion of health and safety in our internal audit for 9001:2008.


Am I missing anything here?Read 0.4 of ISO 9001 and you will see that it does not include requirements for EMS or OHSMS, etc...

Having an Occupational Health and Safety Management System? Good
Having an integrated Business Management System? Even better.
Trying to use ISO 9001 for health and safety audits? Bad idea.

Welcome to The Cove! :bigwave:

I agree with Sidney, and especially in that EMS and OHSAS aren't required for ISO 9001.

For that reason I would limit the extent to which safety program factors get included in quality audits.

The main focus of ISO 9001 is business systems, yes? And health and safety are part of the people portion of those business systems - how the health and safety helps the people to do their jobs well. The standard's focus is limited to that, so I wouldn't go much farther than that, if at all, when auditing.

Since stressors (temperature, noise, wind, fatigue, vibration, chemical exposure etc.) in various industries have been known to reduce people's effectiveness on the job, I look at how well we meet those needs as we decided to in our business system.

That doesn't mean I do an OSHA audit, though if I saw something I knew was illegal I would need to call it out. I don't look at health and safety records. I look at infrastructure, awareness of responsibility, and work environment using the question as a means test: Have we made efforts to help keep up personnel physical readiness to do a good job, and through it bring customer satisfaction? What did we do? Is it working? That's pretty much it.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear. I already audit my health and safety, after a fashion. I conduct monthly health and safety inspections off a checklist. I als conduct tailgate meetings, train people, create incident reports, complete WSIB Form 7's when we have lost time injuries, etc.

I would not be using ISO 9001 to audit health and safety. I *think* that he has asked me to audit the paperwork and process involved to ensure that the quality is maintained and improved.

I infer from his knowledge of our company that he wants something along the lines of this:

If there is an accident it should raise at the very least an incident report, even if there is no lost time. In addition a simple accident of this sort, say a cut finger from using a bandsaw, should also have objective evidence that the injured party was trained on the machinery, that we had covered safe operation of the bandsaw in a tailgate meeting, that his record was entered on the employee training matrix and that there was also an employee training record for this person, on this machine.

If he did a more effective job of the injury and actually hacked off the finger and lost time, then I would also expect to see a WSIB Form 7 (as there is lost time), a doctors note saying that he is fit to return to work, maybe group insurance documentation if it applied...that sort of thing.

Does that help at all?

I would question a registrar asking for any of those things. Those are health and safety system audit questions, not ISO 9001 questions.

I infer from his knowledge of our company that he wants something along the lines of this:

If there is an accident it should raise at the very least an incident report, even if there is no lost time. In addition a simple accident of this sort, say a cut finger from using a bandsaw, should also have objective evidence that the injured party was trained on the machinery, that we had covered safe operation of the bandsaw in a tailgate meeting, that his record was entered on the employee training matrix and that there was also an employee training record for this person, on this machine.

If he did a more effective job of the injury and actually hacked off the finger and lost time, then I would also expect to see a WSIB Form 7 (as there is lost time), a doctors note saying that he is fit to return to work, maybe group insurance documentation if it applied...that sort of thing.

Does that help at all?Nope. As insightful as some Covers are, we are not psychic. We can not read your auditor's mind. And, assuming he wants what you described, he is over stepping the boundaries of the system he is expected to assess. It is up to you to decide if you are going to oblige to his expectations, but YOUR EXTERNAL AUDITOR is the person you need to ask the questions you are posing here.

Best of luck to you.

Unless you have specifically included health & safety in the scope of your QMS it is out of bounds just a Sidney said.

Did you include health & safety and state that health & safety are part of your quality system?

How you do audits or when you do audits or who does your audits or how you record your audits are not qualifiers.

You need to handle health and safety according to your provencial laws

I'm with the guys here. It is baffling how your external auditor even got into this as it is WAY outside the scope ISO 9001 unless somehow your documentation directed that it is within the scope.

I am in Ontario so I understand the legal requirements from an H&S and you seem to have a very good grasp of the legal requirements.

You need to really ask the auditor what he is looking for and maybe most importantly how H&S is an ISO 9001 requirement (or how it became a requirement). If he tries to say it is a requirement of ISO 9001 you need to nicely adjust his made up requirement (in other words, HUGE stretch to say H&S is an ISO 9001 requirement)

The cove can help you once to have some answers from the auditor about what he is looking for. Everyone would love to help you but more details from your auditor is required.

John

Hi,

I have had a similar question with a registrar. In the end they were not looking for us to include EHS under the ISO registration but only looking to make sure that our QMS and EHS systems were in sink with each other. After looking at the systems and our corportate guidelines we did discover that our record retension policies did not match up. We made some minor changes to keep everything lined up and legal.

The auditor felt that this was a fair question since if we are not in compliance with EHS this may impact our ability to supply product and impact customer satisfaction. It was just a verbal suggestion - nothing official in the audit report.