New safety management system standards worth attention

　　The new national standard GB/T 43500—2023 "Safety Management System Requirements" was issued on November 27, 2023, and will be implemented on June 1, 2024.

　　From the perspective of the food industry, the author believes there are several points particularly worth attention.

　　This "safety" is not the same as that "safety".

　　The standard belongs to the category of public safety management.

　　The standard applies to areas such as production safety, community safety, functional area safety, public place safety, campus safety, traffic safety, disaster prevention and mitigation, and fire safety. However, it does not apply to information security, product safety, public security, and other industry fields.

　　In the GB/T 43500 standard, a hazard that constitutes a safety threat refers to a source that may cause personal injury, health damage, property loss, or environmental damage.

　　Although the narrow sense of "food safety" is not within this scope, the concept of food defense, especially intentional sabotage, also falls under public safety management, so the standard has guiding significance for food enterprises.

　　This standard and other system standards

　　The structure of the standard adopts the high-level structure of ISO management system standards, applicable to general organizations, based on the PDCA cycle concept and risk management principles. The standard can be used for self-assessment and declaration, second-party or third-party certification or registration.

　　The standard partially revises and adopts relevant content from ISO 28000-2022 "Security and Resilience — Security Management System Requirements" to reflect common requirements in the field of safety management. In ISO 28000-2022, safety refers to a state without danger or threat, and resilience refers to the ability to withstand and adapt in changing environments, mainly based on organizational (including supply chain) operational safety.

　　For organizations that have implemented GB/T 45001/ISO 45001 "Occupational Health and Safety Management System Requirements and Usage Guide," this provides an extended space.

　　"Safety Culture" is worth learning from.

　　The standard defines "safety culture" and divides it into organizational safety culture and individual safety culture.

　　Definition of safety culture: the sum of attitudes, concepts, awareness, behaviors, and safety systems formed during organizational operation or management.

　　In the GB/T 43500 standard, safety culture is proposed as the sum of various qualities and attitudes existing in organizations and individuals.

　　The author believes that "food safety culture" has become an important part of many food safety management system standards. Understanding and building food safety culture is a topic actively explored by many enterprises and organizations. The safety culture in the public safety field is universal and can be used as a reference.

　　Establish: Hazard Identification and Control Mechanism

　　The GB/T 43500 standard clearly defines what a hazard is and puts forward requirements for hazard identification and control work.

　　Definition of "hazard": Hidden peril, unsafe human behaviors, unsafe conditions of objects, management defects, or a combination of one or more of these that can lead to safety incidents.

　　Hazard Identification and Safety Risk Control

　　The standard proposes a "dual prevention system" and clarifies the relationship between safety risk control and hazard identification.

　　Since food enterprises in actual business management need to pay attention not only to food safety but also to production safety and other safety issues, safety risks are forward-looking and uncertain; hazard identification is more practical. How to organically combine the two can refer to this standard.