Support at Home: What It Means for Aged Care Workers and Providers

Since 1 November 2025, Support at Home has been the main way the Australian Government funds in-home aged care, replacing Home Care Packages and the Short-Term Restorative Care Programme. It's part of the wider Aged Care Act reforms, and it has understandably generated a lot of coverage about what it means for older Australians and their families choosing care. That side of the story is already well covered elsewhere.

This post takes a different angle. If you work in aged care, run a home care service, or manage a team of support workers, Support at Home isn't really a story about care packages and budgets — it's a story about what you now have to prove, document and train for. That's what this article focuses on: the compliance obligations for workers and providers, sitting alongside the broader reform picture we've covered in our guide to healthcare compliance and CPD training in Australia.

What Support at Home actually changed

Support at Home commenced on 1 November 2025 as part of the new Aged Care Act, which replaced the 1997 Aged Care Act. It brought in-home aged care funding under one program, moving people off Home Care Packages and the Short-Term Restorative Care Programme. The Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) hasn't moved across yet — the government has said that transition won't happen before 1 July 2027, so CHSP providers are currently operating under a separate set of arrangements while the rest of the sector adjusts.

For providers, one of the more practical changes is a tiered registration category system. Depending on the type and complexity of services a provider delivers, they sit in a particular registration category, and that category determines which obligations apply. Providers in the categories that deliver care or care management (broadly, the higher categories) must comply with the strengthened Quality Standards from 1 November 2025 — including being audited against them. Providers in the lower registration categories aren't audited against the Quality Standards in the same way, but they still carry other regulatory obligations under the Act. In other words, "we're a smaller provider" doesn't mean "we're exempt" — it means a different, but still real, set of requirements.

All of this sits inside a single, over-arching expectation: every provider must ensure its workers and "responsible persons" (think CEOs, board members, key personnel) follow the Code of Conduct for Aged Care. That Code isn't new to this reform, but Support at Home has sharpened the compliance environment around it, tying it more explicitly to registration, screening and quality obligations.

What it means for worker screening

This is where the reform lands hardest on individual workers. Under the Aged Care Act, worker screening obligations have expanded well beyond direct care staff. The requirement now reaches contractors, subcontractors, allied health professionals, labour hire workers, kitchen, cleaning, laundry and administrative staff, volunteers, and even sole traders delivering funded aged care services. It also extends to services many people wouldn't think to flag — for example, a gardening service delivered through a registered Support at Home provider can fall inside the screening net.

Currently, workers generally need one of two things: a police certificate that's less than three years old and free of precluding offences, or an NDIS Worker Screening Check clearance, which is valid for five years and removes the need for a separate police certificate. Providers delivering CHSP or National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program services face a somewhat stricter standard around certain offence categories.

There's also a cross-recognition principle worth understanding if your organisation — or your workforce — touches both sectors: an aged care worker screening check is intended to be recognised in the NDIS sector and vice versa. We've gone into this in more detail, including how the checks compare and what "recognised" actually means in practice, in our guide to the aged care worker screening check in Australia — that post explains the screening framework this Support at Home reform now sits inside.

A genuinely new, unified Aged Care Worker Screening Check — modelled on the NDIS approach — has been flagged by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing as the longer-term direction, with guidance material updated as recently as March 2026. Existing police certificates can continue to be used until they expire, so there's no need to rush out and re-screen a whole workforce overnight. But because the detail of the unified check, and a separate proposed national worker registration scheme for aged care workers, is still being finalised and consulted on, providers should treat this as a "watch this space" item rather than a fixed rulebook — check the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing's website for the current status before making workforce decisions based on it.

What it means for provider quality and training obligations

Screening is only one piece. The strengthened Quality Standards also put real weight on how providers manage, train and supervise their people — this sits under what the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission describes as human resource management obligations.

In practice, that means providers are expected to run proper pre-employment checks (not just the screening check itself, but reference checks, qualification verification and employment history), keep documented records of worker qualifications and competencies, and roster appropriately skilled staff — including thinking about continuity of care and staffing levels at higher-risk times such as mornings, mealtimes and bedtime.

On training specifically, providers need a training system that's actually built with input from workers and the older people receiving care — not a one-off induction module ticked off and forgotten. The core competencies called out include person-centred, rights-based care; culturally safe, trauma-aware and healing-informed care; dementia care; responding to medical emergencies; and understanding of the regulatory requirements workers operate under. Training also needs to be accessible to workers who speak English as a second language, and providers are expected to keep refreshing it in response to feedback, complaints and performance data — not treat it as a fixed curriculum.

Supervision and support obligations follow the same logic. Workers — particularly those working solo in clients' homes, which describes much of the Support at Home workforce — need access to appropriate supervision, a way to escalate concerns, and support that's culturally sensitive and genuinely reachable. And providers are expected to formally assess worker performance on a regular basis, incorporating feedback from clients, colleagues and supervisors, with documented improvement plans where something isn't working.

Put together, this is the practical shape of "compliance" under Support at Home for a provider: current worker screening on file, a documented and evolving training system that covers the mandated competencies, real supervision structures for a dispersed home-care workforce, and a paper trail that shows all of it is actually happening — not just written down somewhere.

Staying ready as the detail settles

Some parts of this reform are still moving — the unified worker screening check and the national worker registration scheme both fall into that category, and providers are best served checking official guidance regularly rather than relying on a single point-in-time summary, including this one. What's already locked in, though, is the underlying expectation: providers need to be able to demonstrate, on request, that their people are appropriately screened, trained and supervised.

That's exactly the kind of ongoing, evidence-ready training Learnsignal builds for aged care and support work teams. If your organisation needs a straightforward way to keep CPD and compliance training current across a home-care workforce, our CPD training programmes are worth a look.

This article is general information only and doesn't constitute legal or regulatory advice. Aged care regulation changes regularly — always check the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission for the current requirements that apply to your organisation.