Clause 6.1.4: Planning action
The organization plans actions on its risks and opportunities and on its legal and other requirements, and also plans how it will get ready for and respond to emergencies.
What clause 6.1.4 asks
The organization plans actions on its risks and opportunities and on its legal and other requirements, and also plans how it will get ready for and respond to emergencies. It plans how those actions will be built into and carried out through the processes of its OH&S management system or other business processes, and how their effectiveness will be judged. In planning, it takes account of the hierarchy of controls and of what the system produces, and it considers good practice, the technology options available, and its financial, operational and business requirements.
Planning action is where the hierarchy of controls stops being a slogan. The clause asks how each action will be integrated into a process and how its effectiveness will be judged.
Draft 6.1.4 Planning actions, from clause 6.1.4. The draft contents keep the clause, with the title in the plural form. The summaries do not describe a substantive change.
Evidence for clause 6.1.4
An auditor will pick an action and ask what it was meant to change, where it sits in the hierarchy, and how the organization knows it worked.
- Action planningAction plans with owners, dates and integration points
- Action planningEvidence the hierarchy of controls was applied in selecting actions
- Action planningEffectiveness evaluation records for completed actions
Where clause 6.1.4 commonly fails
- Actions default to PPE and procedures with no consideration of elimination or substitution
- No plan for evaluating whether actions worked
- Actions not integrated into operational processes
What to do about clause 6.1.4 before the revision
Add an effectiveness test to every open action. Record why a higher-order control was not used where PPE or training was chosen. Show one action integrated into a business process with a budget and a date.
What the record shows for clause 6.1.4
An auditor working on clause 6.1.4 will start with Action plans with owners, dates and integration points. The failure this record sees most often is Actions default to PPE and procedures with no consideration of elimination or substitution. Both are carried into the kit as row 14, with an owner field and a dated action.
Read across from clause 6.1.4
Read the next clause in the group, or open the full index. The revision map shows the draft structure.
Source for clause 6.1.4: ISO 45001:2018, clause 6.1.4, retrieved 18 October 2026. The draft note rests on the public DIS contents and the two named summaries; the requirement, evidence and gaps are written from the held clause record. Every source.