NORTHUMBRIAN WATER BOOSTS HEALTH AND SAFETY WITH OHSAS 18001

Northumbrian Water has gained OHSAS 18001 certification, demonstrating its commitment to operating a healthy, safe, and continually improving working environment.

About Northumbrian Water

Northumbrian Water Limited serves a population of 2.6 million people in the North East of England with water and sewerage services and 1.7 million in the South East of England where it provides water services trading as Essex & Suffolk Water. The company, which has its’ headquarters in Durham, employs around 3,000 people and supplies over 13 million litres of water a day through 25,000km of water pipes – this would be enough to stretch from Durham to Sydney in Australia.

Quality

Northumbrian Water has among the best water quality in the UK and it constantly monitors levels of customer satisfaction. These have been consistently high and recent results show overall satisfaction at 91% and a value for money rating of 83%.

To maintain and improve water quality, Northumbrian Water invests almost £200 million a year in capital projects.

OHSAS 18001 Explained

Similar in concept to the ISO 9001:2000 (quality management) and ISO 14001:2004 (environmental management) standards, the OHSAS 18001:1999 standard has been developed by international third-party certification bodies, national standards bodies and consultants to help organisations operate an occupational health and safety (OH&S) management system compliant with relevant legislation.

This is based on establishing and maintaining a formal occupational health and safety management system (OH&SMS) to ensure a structured, systematic approach to OH&S and risk. As with ISO 9000 and ISO 14001, the OHSAS 18001 system uses a cycle of plan, do, check, review and improve.

OHSAS 18001 is a simple and effective toolkit for safeguarding and continually improving OH&S. It prescribes only what must happen, leaving the organisation free to decide how this should be implemented.

Internationally recognised, OHSAS 18001:

• Helps organisations to prioritise and control OH&S issues;
  
  
• Helps them to reduce risks, accidents and illness, downtime, and operating costs;
  
  
• Helps to improve staff well-being, motivation and understanding of everyone’s role in ensuring workplace safety;
  
  
• Helps to improve organisational performance;
  
  
• Translates the results of risk assessments, incident investigations, independent audits, inspections and reviews into risk-minimisation action plans;
  
  
• Clearly demonstrates an organisation’s good governance, due diligence, responsibilities and proactive commitment to OH&S;
  
  
• Proves high levels of OH&S when bidding for international contracts, expanding locally, or negotiating lower insurance premiums;
  
  
• Shows an organisation assesses, understands, manages and minimises hazards and risks to employees and neighbours;
  
  
• Enables, emphasises and encourages transparency, objective setting, and continual improvement in OH&S and related management systems;
  
  
• Ensures legal compliance, reducing the risk of penalties or prosecution;
  
  
• Enhances an organisation’s reputation and image.

With OHSAS 18001 in place, organisations can avoid ad hoc, reactive ‘fire-fighting’ of issues. Such measures could be ineffective and simply reappear.

OHSAS 18001 can be integrated with an organisation’s existing OH&SMS, so avoiding a clumsy and ineffectual ‘bolt on’ situation. It can easily be integrated with other systems such as BS 8800 and HS (G) 65.

Implementing OHSAS 18001

In the first phase of an OHSAS 18001 assessment, the preliminary review assesses risk, recognises existing compliance and starts a process of continual improvement.

Phase two involves the assessment of areas such as safety policy, management roles, hazard identification, safety rules, action plans, procedures, training, reporting, preventive and corrective action, emergency preparedness and response, and performance measurement and the monitoring of internal audits.

Phase three involves a full on-site visit to verify OH&SMS implementation.

Regular SGS audits and assessments enable clients to continually use, monitor and improve their OH&SMS and related processes.

Northumbrian Water and OHSAS 18001

Building on its existing ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001:2004 certifications, Northumbrian Water gained OHSAS 18001:1999 in November 2007.

'We had used SGS for our previous assessments so chose the company for our OHSAS 18001 assessment,' says Northumbrian Water Quality Co-ordinator, Peter Abbott. 'We were happy to use SGS again – SGS’s services, staff, training and support have always been fine.'

'We want health and safety to be an integral part of our business processes and OHSAS 18001 certification will help us keep OH&S high on our agenda,' says Peter Abbott. 'It will enable us to ensure systems are in place, address issues and continually improve.'

'More important than the badge, OHSAS 18001 helps us to further improve our OH&S management and our ability to demonstrate that we have effective systems in place.'

Kimberley Naisbit, Northumbrian Water Health & Safety Manager, says: 'We are delighted to have gained OHSAS 18001 certification. We realise that there is always room for improvement in health and safety, and this certification provides an additional resource to support our efforts to identify and therefore deliver those improvements. We are looking forward to the future challenge.'

SGS Assessor Kevin Palmer says: 'Northumbrian Water has worked hard over a sustained period to improve their OHS performance and outcomes and see the 18001 certification as an additional driver in continuing their journey.' This latest certification brings everything together – Northumbrian Water operates a highly integrated management system incorporating ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. This enables a degree of overlapping during audits where issues are identified and fed through to the relevant skill base.

SGS and OHSAS 18001

Issuing over 80,000 certificates a year, SGS is the world’s leading certification organisation. SGS employs more than 56,000 people at almost 1,000 offices and laboratories worldwide.

SGS OHSAS 18001 audits and assessments measure efficiency and progress and act as building blocks in the process of continual improvement.

Wherever in the world they are working, SGS’s highly trained and experienced auditors and assessors are always consistent, customer-focused, objective and ethical.