Policy Statement Record

This record governs the policy document itself — its wording, its signatory, its currency and where it is made available. It does not cover whether people actually received or understood it; that is a separate, evidenced step.

The clause map below ties the record's four content and currency checks back to specific requirements in ISO 45001 cl.5.2, rather than treating the policy as a single pass/fail block.

ISO 45001 is not tied to a single legal jurisdiction, but how the policy statement is treated varies by where and how the certification is used.

Filling in the fields is mechanical. The judgement calls below are what actually determine whether the record defends the policy or just documents that a form was opened.

These are the failure patterns that recur across sites running this record, mapped to the clause they break and the fix that actually clears them.

A distribution site had one policy statement, framed, dated four years prior, signed by a managing director who had left when the business was acquired eighteen months earlier. Nobody had a role called "policy owner" in the interim, so the review date simply lapsed without anyone noticing it lapse.

Reissuing it took an afternoon once someone owned it: new signatory, updated commitments reflecting the acquired entity's actual product range, and a translated second copy for a warehouse team that was majority non-English-speaking. The finding wasn't that the content was wrong — it was that no record had ever forced the question to be asked.

The signature and the wording are the visible part. Catching the drift between review cycles — a departed signatory, a structure change nobody flagged — is the part that depends on something actually watching the calendar.

KnowComply

Holds the policy statement against the review interval, flags a departed signatory automatically once role changes are logged, and keeps the version history intact when a revision is issued.

KnowSafe

Feeds the OH&S-specific commitments and risk context this policy needs to stay appropriate, so the content check isn't done from memory.

KnowQuality

Keeps the equivalent quality-policy commitments aligned where a site runs an integrated management system, avoiding two policies that quietly drift apart.

Ella

Surfaces the review as it comes due, drafts the reissue for a human to approve, and never signs or publishes a policy on your behalf without that sign-off.

Top management

The person or group who directs and controls the organisation at the highest level. In ISO 45001 they must personally take accountability for the OH&S policy, not merely delegate its drafting.

Documented information

ISO's term for any controlled record or document a management system requires — replacing the older split between "documents" and "records". The policy statement is documented information that must be maintained and controlled.

Interested party

Any person or organisation that can affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by the OH&S management system — workers, regulators, contractors, neighbours and customers among them.

Version control

The discipline of uniquely identifying each issue of a document and withdrawing prior issues from active use, so only one current version can ever be referenced or displayed.

Management review

The scheduled, top-management-led evaluation of the whole OH&S system, one input to which is whether the policy remains suitable. It is where systemic policy drift should surface if this record's own review has been skipped.