FREE FREIGHT AUSTRALIA WIDE FOR ORDERS OVER $139
How Do I Conduct a Risk Assessment for First Aid Kits in the Workplace in Australia?
A small accounting practice and a regional civil works site both sit under the same Safe Work Australia Code of Practice for first aid. The duty to provide it is identical. What that duty produces in each workplace looks nothing alike. A first aid risk assessment is the document that gets you from a shared obligation to a workplace-specific answer.
The assessment is what tells you whether one general kit is enough for the accounting practice, or whether the civil works site needs trauma kits at each crew location plus an automated external defibrillator at the site office. Working through it properly is the difference between a kit that gets used when something happens and one that sits in a cupboard, expired.
This article walks through how to do that assessment for an Australian workplace, working from the Code of Practice through to practical placement and ongoing maintenance.
Why Conduct a First Aid Risk Assessment in Australia?
A workplace first aid risk assessment is the process of identifying the hazards on a specific site, judging how likely and how serious resulting injuries would be, then deciding what first aid kits, training, and equipment are needed to respond. Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace expects this assessment as the basis for every workplace first aid decision.
Safe Work Australia Requirements
The Safe Work Australia Model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace does not hand businesses a prescribed kit list. It sets out a process. Assess the hazards, the number of workers, the nature of the work, the location, and the time it would take to get medical help if something serious happened. The first aid provided then has to match what that assessment reveals.
The often-quoted ratios of one kit per 25 workers in lower-risk settings and one per 10 in higher-risk settings are general guidance that informs the assessment, not a mandated formula in the model Code. State and territory regulators reference them, and a kit-per-worker calculation is a reasonable starting point. The Code is clear that the final call sits with the assessment, not a ratio.
For an overview of how risk assessment, training, signage, and kit choice fit together, the Workplace First Aid Compliance hub walks through the full compliance picture for Australian businesses.
Why workplaces differ
An office, a commercial kitchen, a construction site, and a regional school carry different injury risks. Paper cuts and ergonomic strain dominate one. Burns, scalds, and knife injuries dominate another. Falls, crush injuries, and eye injuries dominate the third. A single generic kit cannot cover all of them well.
Sites that run multiple shifts, casual staff, contractors, or workers in different buildings add another layer. A risk assessment is the document that pulls all of this together into a defensible set of decisions about what to provide and where to put it.
Steps to Conduct a First Aid Risk Assessment
Step 1: Identify Workplace Hazards
Start with what could actually happen. The hazard categories usually cluster into four:
- Physical hazards. Machinery, hand tools, slippery floors, falls from height, electrical sources, manual handling.
- Chemical hazards. Cleaning products, solvents, fuels, food-handling chemicals, agricultural chemicals, dust exposure.
- Environmental hazards. Heat, cold, UV exposure, dehydration, working in remote locations far from help.
- Human factors. Fatigue, repetitive strain, stress, working alone, language barriers in safety communication.
Walk the workplace, talk to the people who do the work, and review the past two years of incident reports. Hazards on paper and hazards in practice often differ. A cafe risk assessment that ignores burns from steam wands or knife cuts from prep work has missed what actually happens. An office risk assessment that ignores ergonomic injuries has done the same.
In our experience servicing kits across hundreds of Australian workplaces, environmental hazards are the most under-rated category. Heat stress on summer construction sites, cold and dehydration on early-morning regional outdoor work, UV exposure across agriculture and trades. The kit response usually lags the hazard by a season.
Step 2: Assess Risk Levels and Needs
Once hazards are listed, work through two questions for each one. How likely is the injury, and how serious is it if it happens? A combination of likelihood and severity gives a risk rating that drives kit decisions.
- Lower-risk workplaces. Offices, retail counters, smaller administrative spaces. The injury pattern is minor cuts, abrasions, occasional burns from kettles or steam. A general-purpose office or retail kit usually suits.
- Higher-risk workplaces. Construction, manufacturing, hospitality kitchens, civil works, transport. Severity climbs: fractures, deeper lacerations, burns, eye injuries, heat illness. Trauma capability, eyewash, and burn cover become essential, not optional.
- Workplace size and layout. Bigger sites, multiple floors, or workers spread across vehicles need more than one kit. Coverage matters more than total kit count.
- Time to medical help. Remote and regional sites need higher-spec kits than CBD sites with hospitals nearby. The Code of Practice flags this explicitly.
Hospitality kitchens are a good example of the gap between perceived and actual risk. Steam burns get flagged in safety briefings, but knife injuries and slips on wet floors are usually what shows up in the incident log. The risk assessment has to be informed by what actually happens, not just by what staff think is most likely.
Some workplaces, particularly hospitality and food handling, also need food handling first aid kits with blue visual plasters in addition to a general kit. The blue plasters are required so any plaster that falls into food is detectable at the point of handling.
Step 3: Determine Kit Quantity and Contents
The assessment outputs three decisions. How many kits, what type, and what specifically goes in them.
- Number of kits. Cover every work area, every shift, and every floor. Two kits in a single break room aren’t useful if a third area has none. Tradies’ vehicles, delivery vans, and mobile crew vehicles need their own kits.
- Type of kit. Match the kit to the work. Construction sites need trauma and bleed control capability. Kitchens need burn dressings and blue plasters. Outdoor crews need snake bite cover. The construction first aid kit requirements article covers what a higher-risk site kit needs to include.
- Specialised additions. Eye wash for chemical handling, snake bite bandages for outdoor work, AEDs for high-risk or remote sites, child-appropriate items for childcare or schools.
The kit count for a given workforce is its own question. The article on how many first aid kits a workplace needs breaks down the calculation with worked examples.
Implementing Your First Aid Plan
Strategic Kit Placement
Placement is where most assessments get let down. A correctly chosen kit in the wrong spot is the same as no kit.
- Visibility. Mount kits in plain sight, ideally near break rooms, exits, and high-traffic areas. Use clear green-and-white signage.
- Coverage across the site. Every work area should reach a kit within a short walk. For larger sites, that usually means one kit per floor or per work zone, not one centralised kit.
- Vehicles and mobile work. Trades vehicles, delivery vans, and remote crew vehicles need their own portable kits.
- Shift cover. If the site runs evening, night, or weekend shifts, the assessment needs to confirm kit access during those hours, not just business hours.
- Staff awareness. Run a short briefing as part of induction so new staff know where the kits are and who the trained first aiders are. Awareness is part of the assessment, not a separate thing.
Maintenance and Compliance
A first aid kit only counts if its contents are usable. Maintenance is the work that keeps the assessment current.
- Inspections. Most workplaces work to a six-monthly check, with monthly checks on higher-risk or higher-use sites. The article on keeping a kit well-stocked and organised covers what a check should cover.
- Refills. Replace expired or used items as they are identified. Buying refills costs less than replacing whole kits and keeps the existing kit configuration intact.
- Records. Log inspections, restocks, and any incidents the kit was used for. The records demonstrate due diligence and are what a regulator looks for if anything is queried.
- Responsibility. Someone needs to own it. The article on who is responsible for checking and restocking first aid kits in the workplace walks through how to allocate that role.
Keeping that record current is administrative work that often gets dropped. For workplaces that don’t want to run the spreadsheet themselves, every FAD kit includes a free annual subscription to our proprietary kit management software, KitCheck. The software logs inspections, restocks, and expiry dates against each kit and produces the audit trail a regulator or insurer would ask for if something gets queried.
For higher-risk workplaces, training matters as much as the kit itself. The article on defibrillator training in high-risk workplaces covers why the combination of equipment and trained operators is the actual control measure.
Workplace Culture and Ongoing Preparedness
Leadership and Staff Engagement
A risk assessment that sits in a folder is worth less than one that has been discussed with the people doing the work. Bring management and the floor into the process. Share what was found. Ask staff what they have seen happen that did not get reported. Almost every site we visit has at least one near-miss that has not been logged.
This is not a one-off exercise. Safety culture builds when the assessment becomes part of regular safety conversations, not a once-a-year compliance task.
Ongoing Risk Monitoring
Workplaces change. New equipment, new layouts, new staff, seasonal hazards, a contractor doing different work on site. Any of these can shift the risk profile. The assessment needs an annual review at minimum, plus an update whenever something significant changes.
The same principle applies to the kits themselves. Items expire. Adhesives degrade. Sterile dressings lose their sterile status over time. A workable rule is to review the risk assessment annually and audit the kits against it at the same time.
Conclusion
A first aid risk assessment is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the document that links the actual hazards of a workplace to the actual first aid provided. Done well, the kits match the work, the placement matches the layout, and maintenance keeps everything usable. Skipped or copy-pasted from somewhere else, the kit is decoration.
If your risk assessment has produced a kit list and you want to compare it against the standard Australian workplace categories, the workplace first aid kits range covers the common configurations. First Aid Distributions has supplied Australian workplaces with compliant kits and refills since 2011 from our East Bendigo warehouse. For specific workplace questions, the team is on 03 5443 2239.
FAQ
What is a first aid risk assessment?
A risk assessment for first aid is a structured process of identifying workplace hazards, judging how likely and how serious resulting injuries would be, then deciding what first aid kits, training, and equipment are needed to respond. It is the process the Safe Work Australia Model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace expects.
How often should I review my first aid risk assessment?
At least annually, and any time something significant changes: new equipment, new work processes, staff changes, contractor work on site, or after a significant incident. For higher-change environments like construction, more frequent reviews are appropriate.
How many first aid kits does my workplace need?
The number depends on the risk assessment, the size and layout of the site, shift coverage, and how far workers are from medical help. General guidance suggests one kit per 25 workers in lower-risk settings and one per 10 in higher-risk settings as a starting point, but the assessment is what produces the final answer.
What should be in a workplace first aid kit?
The base contents include bandages, antiseptic wipes, burn dressings, gauze, eye pads, gloves, and a first aid manual. Higher-risk workplaces also need trauma dressings, tourniquets, eye wash, and possibly an AED. Food handling sites also need blue visual plasters. The exact list comes from the risk assessment.
Where should first aid kits be placed in the workplace?
In visible, accessible locations near work areas, with clear signage. Larger sites need multiple kits to cover all work areas and all shifts. Vehicles for tradies and mobile workers need their own portable kits.