Duty of care
The legal obligation to take reasonable care to avoid foreseeable harm to the people you support.
Duty of care is a foundational legal principle across every care setting in Australia. If you support older people, people with disability or children, you have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent harm that a sensible person could foresee. This applies to your direct work, like safe manual handling and medication support, and to acting when you notice a risk to someone's safety or wellbeing.
In practice, duty of care shapes daily decisions. It means following care plans, reporting incidents and concerns promptly, escalating when something is beyond your skill or scope, and not ignoring signs that a person is unsafe. It also balances against a person's right to make their own choices, so the goal is to manage risk without taking over someone's life.
For providers, duty of care underpins screening, training and supervision. Making sure workers are competent and cleared to work is part of meeting that obligation. A clear, current record of a worker's checks and training supports this, which is one reason Koora keeps screening and qualifications visible on a worker's Career Passport. Meeting your duty of care is shared: the worker on shift and the organisation behind them both carry it.
This is general information, not compliance advice. Always confirm requirements with the relevant regulator, and remember that providers keep the legal responsibility to sight credentials and decide who can work.
We work hard to keep it accurate, but the rules change and we will not always get every detail right. If you think something here needs updating, email us at resources@koora.care. We would genuinely rather know, because we all do better when we help each other get it right.