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. Over 70% of aged care workers have experienced some form of workplace violence, according to research published in Human Resource Management in 2025. 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. A workforce that is burning out, traumatised by unmanaged occupational violence, or inadequately supported following serious incidents will not consistently deliver the quality, safe, person-centred care the new Quality Standards require.

This article maps both obligations, examines where they interact, identifies the specific psychosocial hazards most prevalent in aged care settings, and explains why the reporting infrastructure providers build to manage worker psychological safety is also the infrastructure that enables them to meet the governance and continuous improvement obligations under the new Act.

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. All providers are legally required to deliver services in line with the Statement of Rights. 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. The ACQSC audits providers in higher-risk categories against the Quality Standards on registration, renewal, and variation. 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. Standard 2 also requires regular competency-based training of aged care workers on their SIRS obligations. All registered providers must comply with the Strengthened Standards as a condition of registration.

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. This creates a direct legal pathway for both workers and care recipients harmed by governance failures - 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. Reportable incidents include unreasonable use of force, psychological or emotional abuse of a care recipient, unexpected death, neglect, unlawful sexual contact, financial coercion by a staff member, and restrictive practices used outside specified circumstances. Priority 1 incidents must be notified to the ACQSC within 24 hours. Non-compliance can result in penalties, audits, and sanctions.

Critically, the SIRS framework is designed not just to capture incidents but to drive continuous improvement. Providers are expected to use incident data to inform organisation-wide risk management, staff education, and improvement in the service's capacity to prevent, manage, and resolve incidents. A provider whose incident data is incomplete cannot satisfy this continuous improvement 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. The model WHS Regulations, now adopted across every Australian jurisdiction, expressly require PCBUs to identify, assess, control, and review psychosocial hazards in the same way as physical hazards.

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, and expressly reinforces employers' legal duty to manage psychosocial hazards. The report notes directly: safer work leads to safer care.

This is the intersection point. The workforce conditions that generate psychosocial injury claims under WHS law - occupational violence, high job demands, inadequate debriefing, poor peer support - are the same conditions that undermine the quality and safety of care delivered to residents under the Quality Standards.

The Psychosocial Hazard Profile of Aged Care Work

Aged care is not a sector with minor or occasional psychosocial risk. It is a sector where multiple psychosocial hazards operate at high intensity, simultaneously, and structurally.

Occupational Violence and Aggression

Research published in Human Resource Management in 2025 found that over 70% of aged care workers have experienced some form of workplace violence, with high levels of job turnover as a consequence. 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, with research finding that confined spaces, unfamiliar clients, and isolated work environments all compound risk.

Safe Work Australia has published a dedicated occupational hazard profile for the nursing, care and support workforce and a specific 2024 report on workplace violence and aggression in Australian workplaces. Violence from care recipients is a foreseeable hazard in aged care. Under WHS law, it must be managed as such - not accepted as an occupational norm.

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. The 24/7 RN requirement commenced on 1 July 2023. But regulatory requirements for minimum staffing levels do not eliminate the psychosocial burden of working in an environment where demand consistently exceeds capacity.

Lockton's analysis of the aged care sector identified that as workforce shortages increase, staff who are already stretched become significantly more likely to make workers' compensation claims for stress, mental injury, or physical injury. High job demands and poor support are both recognised psychosocial risk factors under the model WHS Code of Practice. The frequency of mental stress claims in Health Care and Social Assistance has been nearly double that of other industries over the past decade, according to Great Place to Work Australia's analysis of Safe Work Australia data.

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. Curtin University researchers found that workers are putting in enormous amounts of emotional, psychological, and practical care without the time or training to manage the psychological demands, particularly given increasing rates of dementia. Research consistently finds that workers receive inadequate debriefing following traumatic incidents, including resident deaths, assaults, and complex care episodes. This is a recognised psychosocial hazard under WHS law: 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 unfamiliar with specific residents' behavioural profiles, less likely to raise concerns for fear of losing shifts, and less connected to internal reporting channels. Migrant workers, who make up a significant proportion of the aged care workforce, may face additional barriers including language, cultural differences in help-seeking behaviour, and uncertainty about employment security. Both groups represent a structural gap in the psychosocial risk management system that affects worker safety and care quality simultaneously.

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. Under Strengthened Quality Standard 2 (Outcome 2.5), providers must implement an incident management system with categories aligned to the SIRS. Under WHS law, providers must capture and respond to psychosocial hazards and harm experienced by workers.

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: reports of workload beyond safe limits, concerns about inadequate support following traumatic care episodes, observations of team culture hazards, and near-misses involving occupational violence.

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 - using incident data to improve the service's capacity to prevent and manage incidents - 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

Responsible persons under the Aged Care Act 2024 must be fit and proper and must exercise their responsibilities in a way that ensures the provider complies with its registration conditions, including the Quality Standards. This duty is active and verifiable.

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 and wellbeing of its workers is missing a leading indicator of future care quality deterioration. High turnover, burnout, under-reporting of concerns, and declining workforce confidence in management all precede care quality failures.

Salus provides aged care governing bodies with precisely this kind of lead indicator data: a confidential, accessible, 24/7 reporting channel that captures psychosocial risk signals from across the workforce in real time. Whether it is a personal care worker raising concerns about unmanageable workload on night shift, an RN reporting inadequate handover following a violent incident, or a home care worker flagging an unsafe client environment, Salus surfaces the signal before it becomes a claim, a SIRS notification, or a care quality failure.

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. Under the Aged Care Act, incident data drives continuous improvement. Under WHS law, it drives hazard identification and control. Both functions require the same data. 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 is the post-incident response protocol for workers, how is its implementation monitored, and what does our data tell us about whether it is 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 that is accessible to all workforce segments - with language accessibility, anonymous pathways, and demonstrated follow-through on concerns raised - 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. The new Act is rights-based, introduces registration conditions tied to Quality Standard compliance, expands ACQSC enforcement powers, and updates 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. This is a significant expansion of personal liability for governing body members.

• WHS psychosocial obligations apply in parallel. Victoria's new OHS (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 from December 2025 completed the national framework. 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. Over 70% of aged care workers have experienced workplace violence. Mental stress claims in Health Care and Social Assistance run at nearly double the rate of other industries. Burnout is identified by SafeWork NSW as an escalating issue requiring organisational-level response. Academic research confirms that structural violence and inadequate post-incident support are normalised in many settings.

• The two obligations interact through incident management systems. Quality Standard 2 requires an incident management system aligned with the SIRS. WHS law requires parallel capture of worker psychosocial incidents and near-misses. Most systems address the first obligation better than the second. 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 covering care recipients and workers; quality post-incident response protocols; and an active reporting culture accessible to casualised and migrant workers.

• Salus provides aged care providers with the confidential, real-time reporting infrastructure that supports both obligations simultaneously: capturing early workforce psychosocial risk signals, generating the continuous improvement data the new Act requires, and demonstrating to both the ACQSC and WHS regulators that governance is evidence-based and proactive.

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. The workforce that delivers care to older Australians is itself entitled to a safe, psychologically healthy workplace - and the quality of care residents receive depends on it. Safe Work Tech's Salus platform is designed for exactly this dual-obligation environment: a confidential, accessible reporting channel that generates the real-time workforce data governing bodies need to satisfy both regimes, prevent harm before it escalates, and demonstrate the evidence-based governance that both the ACQSC and WHS regulators now expect. Contact Safe Work Tech to understand how Salus can close the gap between your aged care compliance programme and your workforce WHS obligations.