The screening rules changed with the new Aged Care Act. Here's what every registered provider now has to hold for each worker and responsible person — and the one thing that trips people up months later.
The Accorda Team · 27 August 2026
Screening has always been part of aged care. But when the new Aged Care Act commenced on 1 November 2025, the rules around who has to be screened, what counts, and what you have to keep on file all firmed up — and they now sit inside a stronger regulatory model.
If you're an owner or manager, the good news is that the day-to-day requirement is simpler to state than you might fear. The catch isn't understanding the rule. It's keeping it true for every worker, every day they're on your books — and being able to prove it when someone asks. This is a plain-English walk through what applies now, who's covered, and where providers most often come unstuck.
Since 1 November 2025, a registered provider must make sure each aged care worker and responsible person holds one of the following:
A police certificate that is less than three years old and does not record certain offences, or
An NDIS Worker Screening Clearance, which is recognised in aged care and is valid for five years.
That's the core of it. One or the other — not both. For providers who also deliver NDIS supports, or who employ people who move between the two sectors, the NDIS clearance doing double duty is a genuine convenience, because it lasts five years rather than three.
There are a couple of add-ons worth knowing. A worker relying on a police certificate who has been a citizen or permanent resident of another country at any time after turning 16 generally also has to provide a statutory declaration about their history overseas. And a worker who starts before their screening has come back through has to declare, in a statutory declaration, that they've never been convicted of a precluding offence — with appropriate supervision in place until the check is complete. These are the details that get skipped when someone's hired in a hurry.
The requirement doesn't stop at your payroll. It reaches:
All employees and contractors delivering funded aged care services
Volunteers engaged by the provider
Workers supplied through third-party agencies and associated providers
Responsible persons — CEOs, board members, and managers who hold executive authority
There's one narrow exemption: secondary school students on formal work experience don't need their own screening, provided they're directly supervised by someone who does hold a police certificate.
If your mental model of screening is "the people who provide hands-on care," widen it. Board members and volunteers are exactly the categories that fall through, because they don't go through the same onboarding path as a new support worker — and they're the ones an auditor will happily ask about.
Screening isn't just about having a certificate on file. It's about acting on what the certificate shows. Providers can't allow someone to work — or to keep working — if they've been convicted of a precluding offence.
For all registered providers, that includes convictions for murder, sexual assault, and assault where a term of imprisonment was imposed. For providers delivering the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP) or the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program (NATSIFACP), the list is more extensive — reaching, for example, certain offences in the past five years involving imprisonment of a year or more, and offences involving the death of a person.
The exact list matters, and it isn't something to reconstruct from memory. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing publishes the current precluding offences, and if a certificate shows anything at all, that's a decision to make carefully and document — not a judgment call to leave to whoever opened the envelope.
Screening isn't a one-off box you tick at the door. It's a standing obligation you have to keep proving — for every worker, and for the whole time they're on your books.
This is where a lot of otherwise-compliant providers have a quiet gap. Holding the clearance isn't the whole job; you have to be able to show the record. Providers are required to keep screening records for seven years from the day the record is made, and those records need to capture the essentials — the worker's name and date of birth, verification that the screening was checked, and who reviewed it.
A few things follow from that seven-year rule that are worth sitting with:
A screening record isn't "done" when the person leaves. You still hold it for years afterwards.
A verification you did but can't locate is, for audit purposes, a verification you can't prove you did.
"We check everyone, we just don't have a central list" is the sentence that turns a good practice into an audit finding.
You may have heard that a single national worker screening check for the whole care and support economy is coming. It's real — the Commonwealth is working with state and territory governments to build a consistent check that would eventually apply across registered providers, aligned with NDIS screening standards.
But it isn't in place yet, and there's no confirmed start date to plan around. So the honest position is: keep doing what the current rules require — a valid police certificate or an NDIS clearance for everyone — and don't wait for the national check before getting your house in order. When it does arrive, the providers who already have a clean, central, up-to-date register will have almost nothing to change. The ones running on spreadsheets and memory will feel it.
None of the individual rules above are hard. The failures are almost never "we didn't know screening was required." They're operational:
A certificate quietly expires and nobody notices until it's already lapsed.
A volunteer or a new board member never gets screened because they didn't come in through the usual hiring door.
The evidence exists — somewhere — but it's spread across email, a shared drive, and someone's filing cabinet, so pulling it together for an audit takes days.
A record can't be dated with confidence, so you can't actually prove when the check was verified.
Every one of those is a tracking-and-evidence problem, not a knowledge problem. Which is exactly the part a good system should carry for you.
Let's be straight about this. Accorda does not run a police check, issue an NDIS Worker Screening Clearance, or decide whether a conviction rules someone out. Those are the provider's responsibilities, and no software should pretend otherwise.
What Accorda does is make sure screening never quietly slips, and that you can prove it held:
The Credentials & Licence Register holds each worker's clearance or certificate with its expiry date, the evidence document, a verification stamp, and its renewal history — for staff and for the business's own accreditations and insurances, in one place.
Smart bundled notifications warn you before a certificate expires, grouped and prioritised so the important renewal doesn't drown in noise — you get runway to act, not a nasty surprise on the day.
Records integrity keeps a tamper-evident trail, so a record's date and history can be trusted, not just its content.
A one-click evidence pack pulls a business-wide register — every worker, their current and past clearances, dates and status — into a branded bundle an auditor can read, which is exactly what that seven-year record-keeping obligation is asking you to be able to produce.
You do the screening. Accorda makes sure nothing lapses, nothing's missed, and you can show your working.
Here's a simple test. If your regulator asked, today, for proof that every current worker, volunteer, and responsible person holds a valid, in-date clearance — and asked you to show when each one was verified — how long would it take you to answer, and how confident would you be that nobody had slipped through?
If the answer is "a while, and not very," that's not a reason to panic. It's just the gap worth closing before someone else finds it for you.
Screening requirements for the aged care workforce — Department of Health, Disability and Ageing
NDIS Worker Screening Check — NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission
This article is general information only, current as at August 2026, and is not legal or compliance advice. Regulatory requirements can change.
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