Marie Martinalli, Head of SHEQ, Integrated Governance & Training and Data Protection Officer for Medequip, talks about our recent successful reaccreditation to key ISO standards alongside the Medequip One Way Integrated Management System.
“Medequip is currently accredited to the four main ISO standards in terms of our compliance platform, including ISO 9001 governing quality, environmental standard ISO 14001, occupational health standard ISO 45001 and ISO 27001 covering information security.
With all four requiring reaccreditation every three years, we made the decision to streamline the auditing for ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, reviewing and combining our processes from an efficiency point of view to minimise operational impact.
Our strategy for reaccreditation has involved partnership with Alcumus, providers of pioneering technology-led risk management solutions. We were already managing our external contractors through Alcumus; their ethos matches our philosophies, driven by health and safety and the desire to promote a culture of safety across our business.
The work has involved a total of 19 days of external audits. As a certified lead auditor for all four standards, I can bring to the table a comprehensive understanding of exactly what is required to achieve a successful outcome. It’s a very vigorous process, with Medequip demonstrating we adhere to our Medequip One Way integrated management system (IMS). All our policies and procedures sit within our IMS – only one way to do it, and only one place to go!
Our comprehensive and harmonised IMS enables us to share information easily and provide remote access to external auditors. With over 900 different policies and procedures at Medequip, it’s a complex process for our auditors to assess how everything is embedded and implemented!
All this work required major input from Medequip people with regard to the upload of evidence and facilitating site visits. All our teams have been very engaged and responsive in producing information and detail, from front line staff though to senior management. I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one for the part they have played in ensuring our reaccreditation efforts have been a smooth and streamlined process.
Work doesn’t stop when we achieve reaccreditation. We look at best practice and carry out our own internal audits to scrutinise our performance going forward. Quarterly meetings are held to discuss the inputs and outputs of our IMS, to ensure continued effectiveness. It’s all about continuous improvement, and I’m extremely proud to be able to report that our results show we’re achieving this.
To finalise, we were successfully reaccredited to information security standard ISO 27001 in January of this year. This is a challenging standard with very different requirements, so we continue to manage this as a standalone project. We had also targeted to achieve energy management standard ISO 50001 by 2025 and I’m pleased to report we’re ahead of schedule, expecting to achieve accreditation in 2024.”