The Final Draft of the Standard (FDIS) ISO 45001 has been approved by the ISO Committee PC 283. It is the first Occupational Health and Safety Management System standard and it is due to be published in March of this year. This document will be available in Spanish, English and French on the AENOR website.

This now concludes the work carried out over the last 5 years by 100 experts from 70 countries, including experts representing Spain from the Spanish Association for Standardisation - UNE.

The main advances include the strengthening of the senior management's role in leading the Occupational Health and Safety Management System, as a relevant part of its business strategy. Similarly, it presents a high-level structure common to the most widely-used management documents in the world, such as ISO 9001 (Quality) and ISO 14001 (Environment).

The publication of this standard is expected to result in the cancellation of the OHSAS 18001 standard. Therefore, companies with this benchmark certification will have a deadline of three years to wrap up migration to ISO 45001. At present, organisations from 130 countries around the globe have successfully applied the OHSAS 18001 standard.

For further information on the ISO 45001 and its relationship with OHSAS 18001, please see the attached document.

At this stage the secretary submits the final document for publication through the Submission Interface. But if the standard has passed through the Approval stage, the secretary may submit the project leader’s responses to member body comments on the FDIS.

Only editorial corrections are made to the final text. It is published by the ISO Central Secretariat as an International Standard.

Committee secretaries and project leaders get a two-week sign off period before the standard is published 

The FDIS is circulated to the National Committees for a two-month voting period. Each National Committee's vote must be explicit: positive, negative or abstention.

No comments are allowed with a positive vote. 

An FDIS is approved if:

- 2/3 majority of P-members voting approve and if
- Less than 25% of all votes submitted are negative.

If the document is approved, it progresses to the final publication stage.

If the document is not approved, it is referred back to the TC or SC to be reconsidered.