Balancing Resident Care and Worker Safety: Navigating OHS in Aged Care Settings

Aged care work is physically and emotionally demanding. Every shift can mean lifting residents, managing unpredictable behaviours, and coping with long hours under pressure. Injuries, stress, and burnout are common when health and safety get sidelined.

Protecting residents is the heart of aged care, but you cannot do that properly if your workforce is stretched thin or working through pain. Safety for workers and safety for residents go hand in hand. One cannot happen without the other.

Managing occupational health and safety (OHS) in aged care takes more than basic policies. It demands real planning, the right equipment, clear systems, and leadership that backs the frontline.

Why OSH risk is so high in aged care

The physical risks (and are not limited to):

• Manual handling injuries from lifting, moving, and repositioning residents
  
• Slips, trips, and falls from wet floors, clutter, or poor lighting
• Sharps injuries when handling medical equipment or waste
• Exposure to hazardous chemicals like cleaning agents or medications

The psychological risks (and are not limited to):

• Stress and burnout from heavy workloads, grief, and difficult shifts
• Violence and aggression from residents or family members
• Bullying, harassment, and conflict between staff
• Isolation and emotional fatigue in high-pressure environments

Growing compliance pressures

• New Aged Care Quality Standards require active risk management for both residents and workers.
• Work Health and Safety Act duties apply across all aged care settings.
• Increased regulatory scrutiny — the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) is stepping up compliance reviews, backed by major funding boosts.
• $2.2 billion was allocated to aged care reform in the 2024-25 Federal Budget, with part of it aimed directly at improving quality, compliance, and workforce standards.

Failing to meet obligations could mean sanctions, funding loss, reputational damage, and legal action.

Key steps to safer, healthier aged care workplaces

If you want a deeper breakdown of the full process, our guide to how to manage work health and safety risks steps you through everything in more detail.

Here’s a quick overview for aged care settings:

1. Identify potential hazards

Start by looking for physical risks like:

• Manual handling injuries – lifting, transferring, and supporting residents puts huge strain on backs, shoulders, and joints.
• Slips, trips, and falls – caused by wet floors, clutter, uneven surfaces, or poor lighting.
• Exposure to biological hazards – dealing with infectious materials like blood, saliva, and waste.

Don’t forget psychosocial risks either, like:

• Workplace violence and aggression – verbal or physical aggression from residents or visitors.
• Stress and burnout – driven by long hours, emotional load, and poor staffing levels.

Get input from your workers and use regular audits and inspections to stay ahead of issues.

2. Assess the risks

Once you’ve spotted hazards, work out:

• How likely the hazard is to cause harm.
• How severe that harm could be.

Use a simple risk matrix to prioritise (what's urgent, what's lower risk). Also, try and bring in your team leads, supervisors, and health and safety reps to get a full picture.

For example:

Manual handling without assistive equipment?

That's a high-risk item that should be tackled straight away.

Minor trip hazard in a staff-only area?

Still important, but maybe not your day-one priority.

3. Control the risks

Follow the hierarchy of controls wherever you can:

• Eliminate the risk if possible (e.g. no manual lifting where assistive equipment can be used).
• Substitute for safer equipment or practices.
• Engineer controls like hoists, slip-resistant flooring, or segregated walkways.
• Administrative controls like safer procedures, better rostering, and training.
• Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as a last line of defence.

4. Monitor, review, and improve

WHS is never set-and-forget.

• Track all incidents, near misses, and hazard reports through a central system.
• Regularly review controls to make sure they still work.
• Get feedback from your frontline teams and make changes where needed.

Tools and systems that help

Good policies are important — but without the right systems behind them, it's easy for things to slip through the cracks.

That’s where platforms like myosh come in. myosh gives aged care providers a central place to log, track, and manage health and safety across their sites.

With myosh you can:

• Log hazards – workers can quickly record hazards as they see them, from trip risks to violent incidents.
• Report incidents – create and manage reports for injuries, near misses, or dangerous behaviour.
• Set up and update safe work protocols – collaboratively build procedures and make sure the right people always have the latest version.
• Manage training – track mandatory aged care training like manual handling, infection control, and aggression de-escalation.
• Monitor health records – stay on top of staff and client health requirements, vaccinations, and incident follow-ups.
• Track vehicles and equipment – register key assets like transport vehicles, hoists, and emergency equipment with service logs and insurance checks.
• Centralise documents and reporting – consolidate policies, audits, inspections, and compliance tracking into one place.

You can customise who sees what based on roles, and the system adapts dynamically to each user's permissions. This makes it easier for aged care sites to stay compliant, spot risks early, and build a stronger safety-first work environment without drowning in paperwork.

Getting the balance right

You can't expect staff to give their best if they're under constant strain, dealing with hazards, or left unsupported. And you can’t build a strong aged care service without a real commitment to worker safety.

The good news is, it’s easier than ever to stay on top of OHS when you’ve got the right systems behind you.

If you're ready to take your safety management to the next level, learn more about how myosh supports aged care providers with an aged care safety management system.