Two Duties, One Workforce: How the Aged Care Act 2024 and WHS Psychosocial Law Now Operate in Parallel

Executive Summary

On 1 November 2025, the Aged Care Act 2024 and its seven Strengthened Quality Standards came into full effect, replacing legislation that had governed the sector since 1997. The new Act is explicitly rights-based, person-centred, and built around accountability. It introduces statutory duties on providers and their responsible persons that parallel Work Health and Safety legislation, new registration requirements, expanded enforcement powers for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC), and an updated Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS) with revised reporting obligations.

What is less well understood, and what this article examines directly, is that the regulatory transformation aged care providers are navigating under the new Act is not happening in isolation. It is converging with a simultaneous transformation in WHS psychosocial obligations that applies with equal force to every aged care provider, and which addresses a distinct but deeply related set of risks: the psychological safety and wellbeing of the workforce delivering care.

This convergence matters for a specific reason. Aged care work is among the most psychosocially demanding in Australia. 93% of aged care workers have experienced physical violence at work, most attacked more than once. The frequency of mental stress claims in Health Care and Social Assistance has been nearly double that of other industries over the past decade. SafeWork NSW has released a dedicated Industry Action Report on burnout as an escalating issue in the sector. And academic research published in the Journal of Industrial Relations in 2025 found that comprehensive WHS laws have not translated to greater vigilance regarding the health and safety rights of care workers in the aged care system, with workers regularly experiencing assault, verbal abuse, and inadequate post-incident support.

Aged care governing bodies and their responsible persons now carry two concurrent legal obligations: to ensure the quality and safety of care delivered to older Australians under the Aged Care Act, and to ensure the health and safety of the workforce delivering that care under WHS law. These obligations are not identical, but they are interdependent.

The Aged Care Act 2024: What Changed on 1 November 2025

The Aged Care Act 2024, passed by Parliament on 25 November 2024 and commencing on 1 November 2025, is the most significant legislative reform of Australia's aged care system in nearly three decades. The Act responds to 58 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and replaces both the Aged Care Act 1997 and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Act 2018.

Its central character is rights-based. A Statement of Rights, embedded in the Act, sets out the rights of older people receiving aged care services, including rights to independence and autonomy, respect for privacy, safe and quality care, and the right to raise issues without fear of reprisal. The new Act also introduces strengthened whistleblower protections for older people, families, representatives, and aged care workers who report concerns.

Registration and Conditions

All providers must now register with the ACQSC. Registration is conditional on compliance with provider governance obligations, including board composition requirements, and with the Strengthened Quality Standards applicable to the provider's registration category. Under the previous Quality Standards, one in five residential aged care services failed to meet all requirements in ACQSC audits during Q1 2023-24. Under the new Act, compliance expectations are higher and enforcement tools are sharper.

Seven Strengthened Quality Standards

The previous eight Quality Standards have been replaced by seven Strengthened Standards, which are more detailed, measurable, and clinically rigorous. Standard 2 (The Organisation) explicitly requires providers to implement an incident management system with documentation, investigation, and management of incidents and near misses, with categories aligned to the SIRS.

Statutory Duties Paralleling WHS Legislation

The Act incorporates existing legislation in parallel frameworks to improve provider accountability. It introduces statutory duties mirroring WHS legislation and enables individuals to seek compensation where a provider or its responsible persons fail to meet their duties, a significant expansion of individual accountability for responsible persons beyond the previous regime.

Updated Serious Incident Response Scheme

The SIRS, expanded from residential care to home and community care from December 2022, has been further updated under the Aged Care Rules 2025 from 1 November 2025. Priority 1 incidents must be notified to the ACQSC within 24 hours. Critically, the SIRS framework is designed not just to capture incidents but to drive continuous improvement, a provider whose incident data is incomplete cannot satisfy this obligation on the basis of what it has.

The WHS Psychosocial Obligation: What Aged Care Providers Must Do by Law

Running in parallel with the Aged Care Act obligations is the WHS obligation to manage psychosocial risk. Under the model Work Health and Safety Act, providers as PCBUs must ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the psychological health and safety of their workers.

Victoria's Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025, completing the national framework. As of December 2025, every Australian aged care provider operates under both aged care legislation and WHS legislation requiring explicit management of psychosocial risk in the workforce.

SafeWork NSW, whose jurisdiction includes one of Australia's largest aged care workforces, has made the sector a specific regulatory priority. Its dedicated Industry Action Report on burnout identifies key drivers in aged care including excessive workloads, poor culture, and low peer support. The report notes directly: safer work leads to safer care.

The Psychosocial Hazard Profile of Aged Care Work

Occupational Violence and Aggression

93% of aged care workers have experienced physical violence at work, most attacked more than once (Cavanagh et al.'s aged-care workforce research). A Curtin University study published in the Journal of Industrial Relations in 2025 described aged care workers as regularly being sworn at, spat on, hit, pushed, and otherwise assaulted on a regular basis by clients, often as a result of dementia-related behavioural and psychological symptoms. Home care workers face additional exposure to violence from care recipients and family members in uncontrolled private settings.

High Job Demands and Chronic Understaffing

The mandatory care minutes regime, rising to 215 minutes per resident per day with specific RN minute targets from October 2024, was a direct legislative response to chronic understaffing identified by the Royal Commission. But regulatory requirements for minimum staffing levels do not eliminate the psychosocial burden of working in an environment where demand consistently exceeds capacity. The frequency of mental stress claims in Health Care and Social Assistance has been nearly double that of other industries over the past decade.

Emotional Labour, Vicarious Trauma, and Inadequate Debriefing

Aged care workers provide sustained emotional support to people in the final years of their lives, often while managing dementia, grief, and complex family dynamics. Research consistently finds that workers receive inadequate debriefing following traumatic incidents, including resident deaths, assaults, and complex care episodes, poor support is one of the fourteen psychosocial hazard categories in the Safe Work Australia Code of Practice.

Casualisation and Structural Reporting Barriers

Research published in 2025 identified casualisation as a key structural factor compromising worker OHS in residential aged care. Casual workers may be less likely to raise concerns for fear of losing shifts. Migrant workers, who make up a significant proportion of the aged care workforce, may face additional barriers including language and uncertainty about employment security.

The Interaction: Where the Two Obligations Meet

The point at which the Aged Care Act obligations and WHS psychosocial obligations most directly intersect is the incident management and reporting system. Most providers' incident management systems were built primarily around SIRS obligations, incidents involving care recipients. They are less well designed to capture worker safety incidents and early psychosocial risk signals from the workforce.

This gap has two regulatory consequences. Under WHS law, failing to identify and capture worker psychosocial harm is itself a compliance failure. Under the Aged Care Act, a provider cannot meet the continuous improvement obligation of Standard 2 if its incident data does not capture the full range of risk operating in the workforce delivering care.

The two obligations do not conflict. They reinforce each other. An aged care provider that builds a genuinely comprehensive, worker-accessible reporting infrastructure simultaneously satisfies its WHS obligation to capture psychosocial risk signals, its Aged Care Act obligation to operate an effective incident management system, and its continuous improvement obligation to use that data proactively.

What Governing Bodies Must Be Able to Demonstrate

1. Workforce Psychological Safety as a Leading Indicator of Care Quality

The Royal Commission found that the quality of care residents receive is directly linked to the working conditions of the workforce delivering it. A governing body that monitors resident care quality outcomes but does not monitor the psychosocial safety of its workers is missing a leading indicator of future care quality deterioration.

2. Integrated Incident Reporting: Care Recipients and Workers Together

Governing bodies should be receiving reporting that covers both the SIRS-relevant incident profile for care recipients and the worker psychosocial incident profile. An integrated system that captures both is more valuable for both purposes than two separate, siloed systems.

3. Post-Incident Response Quality

Research consistently identifies inadequate post-incident support for workers following violence or traumatic incidents as both a WHS failure and a governance failure. Governing bodies should be asking what the post-incident response protocol is, how its implementation is monitored, and what the data shows about whether it's effective.

4. Reporting Culture Across All Workforce Segments

Given that casualised and migrant workers are systematically less likely to report, governing bodies cannot assume that the volume of reports they receive is representative of the level of psychosocial risk operating in the workforce. Active investment in a reporting culture accessible to all workforce segments, with language accessibility, anonymous pathways, and demonstrated follow-through, is both a WHS obligation and a quality governance requirement.

Key Takeaways

• The Aged Care Act 2024 and seven Strengthened Quality Standards commenced on 1 November 2025, expanding ACQSC enforcement powers and updating the SIRS with revised timelines and reporting obligations. Non-compliance risks deregistration, civil penalties, and banning orders.
• The Act introduces statutory duties on providers and responsible persons that mirror WHS legislation, enabling individuals to seek compensation for governance failures, a significant expansion of personal liability.
• WHS psychosocial obligations apply in parallel. Every Australian aged care provider now carries dual statutory obligations: care quality to residents under the Aged Care Act, and psychological safety of the workforce under WHS law.
• The aged care workforce carries one of the highest psychosocial risk profiles in Australia. 93% of aged care workers have experienced physical violence at work. Mental stress claims in Health Care and Social Assistance run at nearly double the rate of other industries.
• The two obligations interact through incident management systems. The continuous improvement requirement of the new Act cannot be met on incomplete data.
• Governing bodies must demonstrate monitoring of workforce psychological safety as a leading indicator of care quality; integrated incident reporting; quality post-incident response protocols; and an active reporting culture accessible to casualised and migrant workers.

Aged care providers who treat their Aged Care Act compliance and their WHS psychosocial compliance as separate programmes are managing two legal obligations with one gap between them.