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AI in Australian Aged Care: Governance Obligations for Providers Under the Strengthened Standards
The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards introduce explicit obligations around dignity, autonomy, and safe care that directly apply to AI deployment in residential and home care settings. What aged care providers and boards must do.
Key Takeaways
The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards (effective 1 November 2025, as part of the Aged Care Act 2024) create explicit obligations around dignity, autonomy, and safe care that apply directly to AI systems used in assessment, care planning, and monitoring of aged care residents.
AI monitoring systems — fall detection cameras, wearable sensors, behavioural monitoring — require specific consent from residents and must be governed to preserve dignity and autonomy obligations under the Standards.
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has enforcement powers that extend to technology governance failures where AI contributes to substandard care — AI is not a shield from accountability.
The Privacy Act's health information provisions apply to all aged care providers — AI systems processing residents' health data, including monitoring AI, require compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.
Workforce management AI in aged care — rostering algorithms, productivity monitoring, performance assessment — must comply with the Fair Work Act and aged care sector enterprise agreements.
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The Strengthened Standards and AI governance
The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, which took effect on 1 November 2025 as part of the Aged Care Act 2024 (the Aged Care Act 2024 commenced on 1 November 2025, replacing the Aged Care Act 1997; the Standards were previously planned for July 2024 but delayed) following the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, create a significantly more demanding governance framework for aged care providers. The Standards are outcome-focused rather than process-focused — they require providers to achieve specific outcomes for residents, including dignity and respect, autonomy, safe and quality care, and effective clinical governance. AI systems deployed in aged care must be governed to achieve these outcomes, not merely to comply with technical process requirements.
Standard 1 (The Person) requires that aged care services are delivered in a way that respects the dignity, identity, and autonomy of each resident. AI monitoring systems — including cameras, motion sensors, and wearable devices — must be implemented in a manner that upholds rather than undermines this standard. The commission has made clear that technological solutions do not override the fundamental obligation to treat residents with dignity. A monitoring system that is intrusive, that operates without meaningful consent, or that strips residents of privacy in intimate moments does not satisfy Standard 1 regardless of its care benefit.
Consent and monitoring AI: the specific obligations
The deployment of AI monitoring technology in residential aged care — including camera-based systems, pressure sensor mats, wearable health monitors, and behavioural monitoring tools — requires specific governance arrangements around consent. The resident (or their substitute decision-maker) must be informed about what monitoring is in place, why it is used, what data is collected and retained, and how it is used in care decisions. This is not a general privacy notice — it is specific, comprehensible information about the specific monitoring system in place.
Residents have the right to decline monitoring that goes beyond what is necessary for their safety and care. A provider that implements pervasive monitoring — including in private spaces like bedrooms and bathrooms — without specific consent and without demonstrating that the monitoring is necessary and proportionate to the resident's care needs is likely in breach of both the Strengthened Standards and the Privacy Act.
Clinical AI and the safe care obligation
AI systems used in clinical decision support — medication management tools, falls risk assessment, pressure injury prediction, deterioration detection — are governed by both the Strengthened Standards' safe care obligation and by the TGA's regulatory framework for Software as a Medical Device. Providers deploying AI clinical decision support must ensure the system is appropriate for use with their specific resident population, that clinical staff understand the system's limitations and do not over-rely on its recommendations, and that there is clear accountability for clinical decisions that AI systems have informed.