Aged care

The Aged Care sector includes workers who provide care, physical assistance, and supervision for the elderly in the home, residential settings, privately funded care, or hospitals.

The risks

Aged care workers face many risks in the workplace, including:

• muscular stress from hazardous manual tasks and patient handling
• slips, trips and falls
• workplace violence and aggression
• psychosocial hazards where aspects of the job, including role overload, low job control, conflict or poor workplace relationships and bullying, can cause a stress response.

Resources

Risk identification resources have been developed to support businesses, employers and workers identify hazards in the workplace and prevent injuries from occurring:

• Sample task related risk assessment checklist designed specifically for transporting people (clients) in a vehicle.
• Risk assessment tool that will help identify hazards in the workplace that may cause harm to workers.
• Fact sheet about how to manage risks during the transition of patient support from one care provider to another.
• Interactive hazard identification diagram (in home care) (PDF, 600.9 KB) – hover over different areas of the home to reveal 14 hazards, including uneven floor surfaces, room layout and lighting.
• Guide produced by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland that outlines important information about the sources of risks faced by care workers entering people’s homes, and controls which can be introduced to prevent injury from manual tasks, violence, stress, biological hazards, fatigue and more.
• Managing musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) risks guide – hazardous manual tasks (non-clinical) in aged care.
• This incident animation shows how a musculoskeletal disorder can occur when handling people in a health, aged care, rehabilitation, or disability support services setting. It highlights the issues and contributing factors that led to the incident as well as what can be done to prevent them from occurring.
• The WorkSafe Victoria handbook provides safe ways to move and handle people. It is aimed at workers in health care, aged care, rehabilitation, and disability services.

Working in people's homes

When work is conducted in a home, the home is considered a workplace.

Watch the ‘Working in People’s homes’ webinar to learn about your WHS obligations when providing care and services in someone’s home.

During the webinar, we introduce the:

• Home Safety Checklist and
• Home Safety Risk Assessment.

Use these resources to help you to identify risks in the home environment. In the webinar we provide practical guidance about when you should use them.

Labour hire and agency workers

Labour hire workers, also known as agency workers, are workers who are directly employed by a PCBU, such as an aged care nursing agency, which then ‘on-hires’ them to perform labour for a different or ‘host’ PCBU.

Both the aged care nursing agency and host PCBU have obligations under the WHS legislation.

Host PCBUs can use the Work Health and Safety checklist (PDF, 756.09 KB) when inducting new agency workers to their workplace or if changes to the workplace require workers to be re-inducted.

Learn more about labour hire.

Research

In October 2020, the NSW Centre for Work Health and Safety published a report about the factors that contribute to musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) risks amongst workers in the aged care sector, and compared interventions designed to prevent injury.

Events

View the SafeWork NSW events calendar.