Australia is joining up care's worker checks. The meantime matters.

Australia is doing something genuinely important: joining up how care workers are screened and recognised across Aged Care, Disability and Childcare. A national worker screening check designed to mirror the NDIS one and be recognised across sectors. Registers that record who is cleared to work. The direction of travel is portability and consistency, and it is the right direction. We want it to succeed.

We also think it is worth being honest about the meantime.

The systems being built are good, and worth getting right

The government is building toward a national, NDIS-aligned worker screening check for the whole care and support economy, and Childcare already runs a live worker register through ACECQA's National Early Childhood Worker Register. Read together, the intent is clear: screening that travels with the worker and is recognised across sectors, instead of being redone behind every employer's door.

These are hard things to get right. They touch state and territory law, sensitive criminal-history data, and the safety of people who depend on care. Rushing them would be worse than taking the time. We are not arguing for speed over care.

But time has a cost, and it falls on the people who need care now

What we do argue is that the meantime is not free. A national screening check is expected no earlier than mid-2026, and the registration scheme behind it is less settled than that. Every month those systems are still being designed is a month the old friction persists: the same worker re-verified at every door, expiries slipping through manual tracking, gaps that surface only when something has already gone wrong.

That friction is not an abstraction. It falls hardest on the people relying on care right now, and on a workforce stretched thin delivering it. That is the gap we built Koora to help close in the interim. Not to pre-empt the systems the government is building, but to reduce the risk that accumulates while they are built. The fuller version of that thesis is in the verification layer the care sector is missing.

Why a tool like Koora can't simply plug in

Here is the honest complication, and it exists for good reasons.

The official systems open direct access to providers, not to third-party tools. A registered provider can confirm a worker's NDIS Worker Screening Clearance through the proper channel, but Koora cannot talk directly to the NDIS database to do the same. Childcare's NQA IT System works the same way: it is built for approved providers and nominated supervisors, not for platforms. That restriction protects sensitive data and keeps tight control over who can query someone's screening status, and those safeguards are right.

It does create an asymmetry, though. Some registers are open enough to verify against: we verify state Working With Children Checks at the source, along with AHPRA registration and government ban registers. Others, like the NDIS worker screening database and the NQA IT System, are deliberately closed to anyone but the provider. For those, what Koora does today is review the clearance, not verify it at the source, and we are careful to say exactly that.

Provider-mediated verification, and opening the door safely

So we are thinking about it from two angles.

The first is provider-mediated. The provider does have access. So rather than claim a direct line we do not have, we are working through ways to help the provider confirm a clearance through the official channel and then capture and monitor that result inside Koora, so the verification is done once and kept current rather than repeated by hand. The provider stays the party with the access and the legal duty; Koora makes the step easier and watches it over time.

The second is bigger than us. For these reforms to deliver their full value, there should be a safe, accredited way for trusted tools, Koora and others, to connect into the official systems on a provider's behalf. Otherwise the entire load of querying, recording and re-checking sits on each provider individually, which is the very burden these reforms are meant to lift. We would like to be part of the conversation about how that door opens safely, with the safeguards intact.

Helping the systems land

None of this is a pitch to replace what the government is building. It is the opposite. We want those systems to succeed, and the sector is better served if the tools providers already use can plug into them cleanly when they arrive.

In the meantime, Koora does the unglamorous part: it reviews credentials, verifies the ones it is allowed to verify, tracks currency so nothing lapses unnoticed, and gives the worker a portable Career Passport so the work is not thrown away at every door. Koora pre-clears; the provider keeps the legal duty to sight evidence and decide who works. That line does not move.

We are early, and we will say so. We are not the sector's verification layer yet, and we will not pretend to be. But it is what we are building toward, and connecting into the systems Australia is putting in place is a large part of how we get there.

The reforms are coming, and they are worth getting right. Until they land, the people who need care should not carry the cost of the wait. Helping carry it is the work. We're here to uplift care.