SIRS is the aged care incident-reporting scheme providers answer to. Here is the plain-English version of what it covers, what the register needs to show, and where to confirm the current detail.
The Accorda Team · 12 October 2026
Every aged care provider keeps an incident register, or should. The harder question is which incidents also have to be reported under the Serious Incident Response Scheme, known as SIRS, and which ones a provider records, assesses and closes out itself. Get this wrong in either direction and it shows: under-report and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission asks why a serious event was never notified; treat every minor incident as reportable and the team spends its time on paperwork instead of residents. What follows is the plain-English version of what SIRS is and why the register matters, not a substitute for the Commission's own guidance.
The Serious Incident Response Scheme is the aged care sector's framework for identifying, managing and reporting incidents that cause harm, or could have caused harm, to a person receiving care. It applies to residential aged care and, in a different form, to home care. The scheme sets out categories of reportable incident, such as unexplained absence, unreasonable use of force, and neglect, and expects a provider to have a system in place to prevent, identify and respond to them, not just a form to fill in after the fact. Scope and category definitions are set by the Commission and the aged care rules, and they are updated from time to time; confirm the current detail for your service with the Commission before relying on it for a live incident.
A reportable incident under SIRS is a defined category, not a stand-in for "something went wrong today." An incident that falls outside the reportable categories is still an incident: it still gets recorded, assessed, and followed up with a corrective action where one is needed. It simply does not trigger the formal notification to the Commission. The scheme does, however, expect a provider to be able to show how that line was drawn for every incident, not only the ones that were ultimately reported.
This is where the "it felt minor at the time" problem shows up. A fall with no apparent injury, a missed medication dose, a disagreement between residents: each of these can sit on either side of the reportable line depending on the detail, and the decision has to be made by someone who understands the test, not worked out later from memory when an assessor asks about it.
An assessor reviewing a provider's compliance does not only check that the incidents that were reported were handled correctly. They also look at the incidents that were assessed as not reportable, and test whether that assessment holds up. If the register shows an incident with no note of who assessed it, what they decided about reportability, or why, that is a finding on its own, independent of whether the original call was right. What the Commission expects to see is: what happened, who was involved, who assessed it, what they decided, and what was done afterwards, including whether families were informed and whether a corrective action followed.
A register that only records outcomes, "resident was fine," "situation resolved," answers the wrong question. The one an assessor asks is about the decision: did someone look at this against the reportable categories, on the day, and write down what they decided and why.
Evidence that a provider checks its own compliance, rather than waiting to be checked, is one of the strongest signals under the Quality Standards. A periodic internal review of the incident register, comparing what was recorded against what the reportable categories actually require, catches the near-misses in reporting before an external assessor does. That internal check does not replace SIRS; it is what makes a provider's SIRS reporting defensible when it is tested.
Accorda's incident management captures what happened on a phone in plain words, close to when it happened, with the reportable decision and who made it kept on the record alongside the incident itself, not reconstructed afterwards. Corrective actions are tracked to close-out, and the complaints and risk registers keep the related record of any complaint a resident or family raises, with its response and outcome on file. None of this replaces the Commission's own SIRS notification channel or its guidance on what is reportable; Accorda keeps the evidence of what was decided and done, ready for when an assessor asks for it.
The free Compliance Readiness Check has an aged care question set, fourteen questions, about four minutes, with a breakdown across nine compliance domains including incident handling. It is a starting point for seeing where a register has gaps, not a substitute for the Commission's own requirements.
SIRS categories, timeframes and the home care variant of the scheme are set out in the aged care rules and the Commission's guidance, and they are updated from time to time. Nothing here is a substitute for checking the current requirements for your service with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission before making a reporting decision on a real incident.
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