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First Aid Kit Requirements for Aged Care Facilities in Australia
An Australian residential aged care facility is two regulated environments at once. It is a workplace under work health and safety law, and it is a care setting under the Aged Care Act 2024. Generic checklists only answer the first half. They tell you what any employer needs on the wall, not what a building full of frail residents and audit-ready care obligations actually calls for.
That gap is why the aged care first aid kit requirements that hold up under an assessor's questions sit at the overlap of both frameworks. Get the workplace baseline right, layer the care-setting expectations on top, then match the contents to the injuries your residents actually present with. This guide walks through each part, current as at October 2026.
What are the first aid kit requirements for aged care facilities in Australia?
Aged care facilities have to satisfy two frameworks at the same time. Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace sets the workplace baseline for kits, first aiders and placement, decided by a risk assessment. The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards under the Aged Care Act 2024, in force since 1 November 2025, add auditable clinical care and incident-management obligations on top of that baseline.
Neither framework hands you a mandatory parts list. The model Code includes an example contents list for a typical kit, but it says contents should be based on your own risk assessment, and the aged care Standards add no kit list at all. For a care setting, that assessed risk is higher and more specific than for an office.
The workplace baseline
Every facility is a workplace, so the model WHS approach applies first. It starts with a first aid assessment, and in a facility that answers to assessors it is worth writing down: the hazards on site, the number and dispersal of workers, how far help is from each area, and the injuries most likely to occur. That assessment drives everything else. The number of kits, where they hang, how many trained first aiders you roster, and how the kits are maintained all flow from it.
Safe Work Australia's model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace suggests first aider ratios of roughly one trained first aider per 50 workers in a low-risk workplace and one per 25 in a higher-risk one. Many residential facilities will assess themselves toward the higher-risk ratio: the Code lists shiftwork and large numbers of other people on site as reasons to provide more first aiders, and treats exposure to physical violence as a marker of a high-risk workplace. Whatever ratio you land on, run it across every shift, including nights. Kits should be clearly signed, reachable by every worker without hunting for a key, and stocked to the risk profile, not to a generic minimum.
One point worth stating plainly: Victoria runs its own OHS Act 2004 and regulations rather than the harmonised model, so a Victorian provider works to WorkSafe Victoria's compliance code instead of the model Code. That code offers a prescribed option with set kit numbers and contents, or a risk assessment approach, which it recommends for large workplaces or those with a complex range of hazards. A residential facility will often fit that second option. For the counting mechanics behind kit numbers, see our guide on how many first aid kits a workplace needs, and for the full framework, our workplace first aid compliance in Australia guide.
The aged care overlay
Here is where a care facility parts company with an ordinary workplace. The strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards took effect on 1 November 2025 with the new Act, and there are now seven of them. Standard 5 covers clinical care directly.
We could find no mention of first aid kits by name in the Standards. But they are assessed on evidence, and their clinical care, risk and incident management outcomes mean a facility should expect to show how it responds when a resident is hurt. The practical way to do that is to show that supplies match your assessed risk, are checked, and sit inside a documented response process.
The shift is from having the right thing on the shelf to being able to show the decision behind it. A kit that is present but unchecked, or stocked with the wrong contents for the resident cohort, is hard to defend when an assessor asks.
What the resident injury profile means for contents
Residents are not warehouse staff. The injury profile skews heavily toward skin tears and falls, which changes what belongs in the kit. Older skin tears easily, and standard adhesive dressings and rigid tape make those wounds worse on removal. The kit needs low-trauma options.
At a stocking level, that means silicone dressings and silicone fixation tape, non-adherent contact layers, silicone-bordered island dressings, and instant cold packs for the knocks and sprains that come with falls. Wound closure strips are not a skin tear product: the International Skin Tear Advisory Panel's 2025 guidance says they should not be used to close a skin tear. This is a what-to-stock signal, not a clinical how-to.
For the selection reasoning behind each dressing type, read our detailed pieces on wound dressing selection in aged care and burns dressings for aged care, and the broader wound care and injury guidance hub. You can build the everyday and skin-integrity side of the kit from the wound dressings range.
Kit counts and placement across a facility
A single reception kit does not cover a building. Placement follows the layout and the hazards in each area. Work through the real footprint:
- Each wing or floor, so help is close to every resident room
- The treatment or clinical room, stocked deeper than a general kit
- The catering kitchen, where burns and knife cuts are the live risk
- Maintenance sheds and grounds, away from the main building
- Any facility vehicles used for resident transport or outings
Count kits by how far a responder has to travel, not by a headcount alone. A large single-storey site with a long corridor may need more kits than its resident numbers suggest, because the distance to the nearest kit is what matters in the moment. You can build the fixed kits from the workplace first aid kits range and configure each to its area.
Documented checking and audit cadence
Contents drift. A kit on a busy wing gets borrowed from for everyday tasks between incidents, so the low-trauma dressings and cold packs you stocked for skin tears and falls can be the first lines to run short. A sterile dressing can no longer be assumed sterile once the packaging is torn or the seal is broken, even with the expiry date still good, so the check has to look at packaging as well as dates.
A defensible cadence for a facility is a monthly visual check of every kit, an expiry sweep each quarter, and restock-on-use so a raided kit is topped up rather than found empty during the next incident. The part assessors care about is the record. You want a log that shows each kit, the date it was checked, who checked it, and what was replaced.
For a provider running many kits across wings, floors and vehicles, keeping that log on a spreadsheet gets unreliable fast. Some facilities keep it in KitCheck, a subscription to our proprietary kit management software, where your own staff log in, check each kit against a picture-matched guide and hold their own records. Facilities in and around Bendigo can also book our onsite audits and restocks by phone or email; elsewhere, restock from first aid kit refills ordered on a trade account.
Emergency response beyond the kit
A first aid kit is one layer. A facility also needs clear escalation. That means a defibrillator that is accessible, maintained and known to staff, since cardiac events rise with age; a documented pathway for who is called and when; and, for anything beyond first aid, calling triple zero so paramedics can assess and transport. Spell that out in your response process and stock a maintained AED from the defibrillators range, and you close the gap between a kit on the wall and an actual emergency.
A facility readiness checklist
Before an assessor visits, run these:
- A current written first aid risk assessment covering every area and shift
- Kits placed by travel distance, including kitchen, grounds and vehicles
- Contents matched to the resident injury profile, low-trauma dressings included
- Trained first aiders rostered across all shifts, nights included
- A monthly check log with dates, names and restock notes
- A maintained, accessible defibrillator and a written escalation pathway
Build each area's kit from our workplace first aid kits range. For a facility kit and supply review, or to set up a trade account, call 03 5443 2239 or email info@firstaiddistributions.com.au.