On a visit to an aged care provider not long ago, I asked the person in charge of their workforce a simple question. Did they have enough staff? “Yes,” she said, “if they turn up for work.” I asked her what she meant. She explained that the roster was full on paper, but the moment anyone fell ill they were short, and with winter and the flu season coming, that gap was only going to widen. Adequate on paper. One sick day from unsafe.
I have been on the other side of that gap. As a young mum with a toddler and a baby at home, I went back to nursing on night shift a few nights a week. Nights were always hard on me, and we were routinely short, which meant everyone carried more. Over a couple of weeks I cared for a young woman my own age with a condition that was outwardly visible and that I found hard to witness. Being close in age, she talked to me, really talked, and I thought about her when I was not at work. I had two nights off, just forty-eight hours. When I came back I did not hear her name at handover. I asked, and was told she had died the morning after my last shift. I was devastated, and there was nowhere to put it but to keep working the shift in front of me, my mind somewhere else entirely, unable to concentrate.
That is what a psychosocial hazard actually costs. Fatigue, chronic short-staffing, grief with no time to recover from it. None of it was a failure of my resilience, and none of it would have been fixed by a wellbeing module. It was built into how the work was designed. And as of 1 July 2026, “we sent them to training” is no longer an answer your regulator will accept.
What actually changed on 1 July 2026
The law here is older than the headlines suggest, and getting it right matters. The Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work was issued by SafeWork NSW back in May 2021.1 It is not new. What changed on 1 July 2026 is its force.
On that date, section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act commenced, and approved codes of practice stopped being advisory guidance and became enforceable benchmarks.2 From now on, a provider has to do one of two things: follow the approved code, or show that what they do instead achieves an equivalent or higher standard of safety. The regulator does not have to wait for someone to be harmed. Falling short of the code can itself be the breach.
Underneath that sits the other half of the change. The Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025, which commenced in August 2025, now requires psychosocial risks to be managed using the hierarchy of controls.3 That phrase has a precise meaning. You eliminate the risk where you can, and where you cannot, you work down a ranked order: redesign the work first, and only rely on lower-order measures like training and counselling further down the list. A counsellor on a phone line and a module on resilience are not nothing. But they sit at the bottom of that hierarchy, and on their own they will not satisfy the duty. This is the section the rest of this cluster builds on, so it is worth reading twice.
The psychosocial hazards that are specific to aged care
Generic WHS advice treats every workplace the same. Aged care is not the same. Here is where the real risk sits.
Chronic understaffing, by design
The sharpest hazard in aged care is not a worker who cannot cope. It is a roster that is full until the first absence and unsafe after it. The sector has run short of workers for years.4 When staffing is that thin, workload and pace become a standing psychological load on everyone left holding the floor, and no amount of individual training redesigns a roster.
Repeated grief, with no recovery time
People in your care die, and they die often. That is the nature of the work and it is not a flaw. The hazard is the absence of any built-in space to absorb it. A death at the end of a shift, and then straight on to the next resident, the next shift, the next fortnight, with nowhere to put the loss.
Moral distress and role ambiguity
Few things wear a carer down faster than being asked to deliver care the roster will not allow. Knowing what good care looks like, and being structurally unable to give it, is its own injury. It has a name now, moral distress, and it is a psychosocial hazard, not a personal failing.
Occupational violence
Aggression, including from residents living with dementia, is a real and recurring risk in this sector. I was once on a palliative ward where a frail, bedridden woman came up behind me with her walking frame raised to strike me. It turned out to be a known behaviour with a management plan around it. That is exactly the point. A recognised, recurring risk is one the system is obliged to control, not one staff are expected to simply absorb.
A culturally unsafe workplace
This last one only lands on part of your workforce, which is why it is the easiest to miss, and it is where the next section goes.
The hazard the others miss: cultural safety as a higher-order control
Everything above is universal. Every nurse and carer lives it, whatever their background. But one psychosocial hazard does not fall on everyone equally, and most providers are not counting it at all.
The aged care workforce is heavily overseas-born. Just over half of all residential aged care employees were born overseas, and around two in five speak a language other than English at home.5 For that workforce, a culturally unsafe workplace is its own psychological hazard, stacked on top of every universal one already listed.
An allied health clinician I spoke with recently told me, with real honesty, that she can never remember her internationally trained colleagues’ names. She finds them hard to pronounce, works to memorise them, and admitted she sometimes mixes people up because, as she put it, they “seemed to look alike.” I asked whether she thought it affected those colleagues. Absolutely, yes, she said. There was no malice in any of it. It was unexamined habit, and the well-documented tendency for people to find faces from their own background easier to tell apart. But names, and being known, are how a person belongs on a team. Being consistently unrecognised, shift after shift, is a quiet, steady stressor. Add being told to “fix your accent,” or being assumed to know an Australian system nobody actually explained, and it stops being hurt feelings. It becomes a chronic workplace stressor, and it is doing exactly what the regulator is now telling you to control at the source.
Here is why it belongs in a WHS conversation and not just a values one. The regulator wants the system redesigned, not the worker trained to endure a broken one. Making a workplace culturally safe is redesigning the system: clear roles, fair rostering, being genuinely heard, belonging. Training someone to cope with exclusion is a lower-order control. Removing the exclusion is a higher-order one. It is the same case we make about one-off DEI training, and the same reason good people quietly leave teams that never felt like theirs. No generic WHS consultant will write this section for you. It is the part of the duty most likely to be missed, and the part aged care can least afford to miss.
Where the two rulebooks meet
Providers often experience this as two separate compliance jobs. It is one. The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards point in the same direction as the WHS psychosocial duty: a workforce that is supported, competent, and culturally safe. Do the psychosocial work properly and you are also building the evidence the aged care standards ask for, around workforce and governance. The reverse holds too. A provider who can actually show a capable, well-supported, culturally literate team is answering both regulators at once, which is exactly why being able to see and evidence that capability is becoming a compliance asset rather than a nice-to-have.
What providers can do now
You do not need a new budget so much as a new target for the spending you already have.
- Map your controls to the code. For each hazard, be able to point to the control and show you reached for the higher-order one first.
- Audit for the aged-care-specific hazards, not a generic list: understaffing, repeated grief, moral distress, occupational violence, and cultural safety.
- Move money from one-off modules to ongoing practice, including culturally safe team design, because the regulator now ranks redesign above training.
- Train your senior clinical and care leaders first. Culture is set at the top of a shift, not at the bottom.
- Ask your overseas-born staff what they actually need. They can usually tell you precisely where the friction sits, if you ask and mean it.
This is the first of three pieces. NDIS providers and hospitals each carry their own version of this duty, under their own regulators, and we will take those next.
The bottom line
A counsellor on a phone line is a lower-order control. Redesigning the work, and making the workplace culturally safe for the people who do it, is the higher-order one the regulator is now asking for. That is the shift that took effect on 1 July 2026, and the providers who treat it as a culture problem rather than a compliance form will be the ones who come out ahead.
If you would like to see what good design looks like now the duty is in force, have a coffee or a call with us, no pitch, just a conversation about your teams. Or take a look at our Communication for Safety course.
References
-
SafeWork NSW (2021). Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work. Sydney: SafeWork NSW. Read the code. ↩
-
Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), s 26A (commenced 1 July 2026). See SafeWork NSW, Legislation. ↩
-
Work Health and Safety Regulation 2025 (NSW), reg 55C, applying the hierarchy of control measures in reg 36 to psychosocial risks (commenced 22 August 2025). ↩
-
Committee for Economic Development of Australia (2021). Duty of Care: Meeting the Aged Care Workforce Challenge. Melbourne: CEDA. Read the report. ↩
-
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2023). Aged care workforce. AIHW GEN aged care data, based on the 2021 Census of Population and Housing. Read more. ↩
