AGED CARE
A resident is found on the floor at 6am on a Sunday. The Priority 1 notice is due within 24 hours.
The clock starts when someone becomes aware, not when the paperwork starts. Twenty-four hours for the priority 1 notice, five days for the follow-up, thirty days for a priority 2, and a separate 24 hours to police where there are reasonable grounds. On a weekend all four run while the person who knows what happened is at home.
Regulator: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission · 6 obligations already in force
What it watches
Reportable incident notices and their 24-hour, 5-day and 30-day clocks, responsible person due-diligence records, worker screening and training per person, registration renewal dates per category.
How it runs today
The incident goes in a paper folder and a group chat, and whether the notice was lodged inside 24 hours is something you find out when the Commission asks.
The obligations, and where each one stands
Every row cites its primary source. Dates are commencement dates, not predictions. Anything still before Parliament is marked as such and carries no countdown.
Priority 1 definition changed under the Aged Care Act 2024
The Aged Care Act 2024 and the Aged Care Rules 2025 started on 1 November 2025 and changed what counts as a Priority 1 incident. The phrase "could reasonably have been expected to have caused" was removed from the definition, neglect was redefined, and "missing consumer" was folded into "unexplained absence". Every incident template, decision tree and staff prompt written against the old definitions now describes a regime that no longer exists.
Source: Aged Care Act 2024 (C2024A00104) and Aged Care Rules 2025, both commenced 1 November 2025; ACQSC — Reportable incidents and SIRS: a quick guide to changes from 1 November 2025 (ASI004) · Enforced by: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Responsible person due diligence duty
Section 180 puts a personal duty on each responsible person: acquire and keep current knowledge of the Act's requirements, and make sure the provider has processes for receiving and responding to incident and risk information. A serious failure is 150 penalty units. A serious failure resulting in death or serious injury is 500 penalty units, which is $182,000 at the $364 penalty unit that applies from 1 July 2026, payable by the individual. Section 180(3) makes a responsible person liable whether or not the provider has been found liable.
Exposure: 500 penalty units — $182,000, payable by the individual
Source: Aged Care Act 2024 s180, authorised compilation C2026C00301 pp.205-207; Crimes (Amount of a Penalty Unit) Instrument 2026 (F2026N00424) s5 · Enforced by: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Payday Super
Super is paid on every payday rather than quarterly, and the contribution has to reach the employee's fund within 7 business days of payday. Some exceptions apply, including for new employees. Every pay run is now its own compliance event with its own clock.
Source: ato.gov.au — About Payday Super (last updated 10 August 2026) · Enforced by: Australian Taxation Office
APP 1.7 — automated decision disclosure
If a computer program uses personal information to make, or do something substantially and directly related to making, a decision that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect someone's rights or interests, the privacy policy has to say so — naming the kinds of personal information used and the kinds of decisions made.
Source: OAIC — APP Guidelines Chapter 1 (APP 1.7–1.9); Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 (Cth) · Enforced by: Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
Priority 1 reportable incident notice
A registered provider has 24 hours from becoming aware of a Priority 1 reportable incident to give the Commissioner a priority 1 notice, then 5 days for the follow-up notice. A Priority 2 incident carries a 30-day notice. Where there are reasonable grounds to report the incident to police, the provider has a separate 24 hours to notify a police officer. The clock starts on awareness, including at 2am on a Sunday.
Exposure: 250 penalty units — $91,000 for failing to notify (Aged Care Act 2024 s165A(3))
Source: Aged Care Rules 2025 (F2025L01173) ss165A-15, 165A-25, 165A-30, Compilation No. 10; Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission — Reportable incidents and SIRS: a quick guide (ASI004) · Enforced by: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Worker screening and training as a condition of registration
Registration carries a condition that the provider complies with the worker screening requirements, that every aged care worker and every responsible person complies with them, and that workers hold the prescribed qualifications and training. The evidence is per person and per clearance expiry, not per policy.
Source: Aged Care Act 2024 s152, authorised compilation C2026C00301 p.174 · Enforced by: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
Registration renewal evidence
Registration runs for a period the Commissioner sets, generally three years. The Commissioner invites renewal once the remaining period falls below the prescribed threshold, and the provider has to re-evidence against every registration category it holds. There is no single national date — the clock is per provider, and it starts well before the invitation arrives.
Source: Aged Care Act 2024 ss106-108 and 115, authorised compilation C2026C00301 · Enforced by: Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission
AI that does the admin. Humans that do the decisions.
The agent tracks which notices are due and when, holds the evidence each one needs, and escalates to the responsible person who owns it. It does not decide whether an incident is reportable, classify its priority, or write the notice. Those are judgement calls that stay with your clinical leads and responsible persons, and section 180 makes them personal.
The guarantee
Audit-ready documentation within 30 days, measured against five acceptance tests we agree before the build starts. Miss them and we rebuild it. The obligation register we build is yours either way.
First install slots are open. Pricing is shared inside the diagnostic.
Questions operators ask
We updated our incident forms when the new Act started. Is that enough?
Updating the form is the easy half. What fails an audit is the trail behind each notice — who became aware and when, what was decided inside the first 24 hours, what the five-day follow-up said, and whether police notification was considered and recorded. The agent tracks the trail, not the template.
Who carries the exposure when a notice is late?
The provider, and separately the responsible person. Section 180 puts a personal due diligence duty on responsible persons, and section 180(3) makes them liable whether or not the provider has been found liable. That is why the agent escalates to a named person rather than a shared inbox.
The Rules keep moving. How does a tracker keep up?
The Aged Care Rules 2025 are already at compilation number 10, less than a year after they started. That churn is the argument for the agent rather than against it: a register that is watched notices a changed definition, a folder of templates does not. Regulatory change monitoring is part of what the agent does, and what it finds goes to a person, never into a silent update.
Do you specialise in aged care?
We specialise in obligation tracking, and our sector depth is NDIS rather than aged care. That is 13 years between us. Richard scaled a provider from zero to 26 homes over five years. The mechanism is the same wherever there are obligations, evidence, deadlines and penalties. If you want a vendor with a decade of aged care war stories, we are not it, and we will say so on the call.
Find out what your register is missing before your regulator does.
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