How does employer liability relate to first aid preparedness?
Short Answer: Employers carry two overlapping forms of liability for first aid. Work health and safety law imposes a statutory duty to provide first aid kits and enough trained first aiders for the risks of the workplace, enforced by regulators through notices and prosecution. Separately, the common law duty of care exposes the business to compensation claims when poor preparation makes an injury worse. A documented risk assessment, backed by equipment that matches it, is the clearest evidence that both duties have been met.
Liability is easier to manage once you understand where it comes from, so before reviewing your own arrangements, you also need to consider the following:
• What duty of care does an employer legally hold?
• Can inadequate supplies lead to compensation claims?
• How do risk assessments protect employers?
• Does providing high-quality kits reduce liability risk?
What duty of care does an employer legally hold?
An employer holds two separate duties that run in parallel. The first is statutory. Under the model Work Health and Safety Act, adopted in every jurisdiction except Victoria, a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and anyone else affected by the work. Regulation 42 of the model WHS Regulations applies that general duty to first aid, requiring equipment that every worker can access and an adequate number of workers trained to give first aid. In deciding what is adequate, the PCBU must weigh the nature of the work and its hazards against the size and location of the workplace and the people who work there.
Victoria sits outside the harmonised scheme, but its Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 imposes a comparable general duty. Western Australia adopted the harmonised model in 2022 and updated its first aid code of practice in November 2024, so arrangements set up under older WA guidance are worth checking against the current version.
The second duty comes from the common law. Courts have long treated an employer's duty to take reasonable care for the safety of employees as non-delegable, which means it cannot be handed off to a contractor or a labour hire agency. Where two businesses share a site or workers, each holds its own duty, so first aid arrangements should be agreed in writing rather than assumed. A labour hire worker injured at a host employer's site may have a claim against both businesses if neither ensured first aid cover on that shift.
Can inadequate supplies lead to compensation claims?
They can, although usually not in the way business owners expect. Workers compensation is a no-fault scheme, so a worker hurt on the job receives benefits whether the kit was full or empty. Supplies become relevant when the worker sues the employer for negligence and seeks common law damages on top of those statutory entitlements.
Access to those damages varies by jurisdiction. In New South Wales a worker needs at least 15 per cent permanent impairment and can recover only economic loss, while Victoria requires a serious injury to be established before proceedings can start. The Northern Territory has abolished common law claims against employers entirely. The injuries that clear these thresholds are often the ones where the first minutes of treatment mattered most, such as uncontrolled bleeding or a serious burn.
Inadequate supplies tend to feature in these claims as aggravation rather than cause. The machine that crushed a hand may have been properly guarded, yet if the wound was dressed with an expired, non-sterile pad and later became infected, the worker can argue that the business made a bad injury worse. That narrower argument is often easier to prove, because the inspection log, or its absence, shows the gap plainly. Contractors and visitors sit outside workers compensation thresholds altogether and can sue in negligence through a public liability claim.
How do risk assessments protect employers?
The Model Code of Practice: First Aid in the Workplace states that a risk assessment will help determine the first aid a workplace needs. A written, dated assessment is also the simplest way to prove the PCBU considered the matters the regulations require. When liability is tested, the question is what was reasonably practicable given what the business knew, or ought reasonably to have known, about its hazards. An assessment answers that question in the employer's own words, recorded before anything went wrong.
A defensible assessment links each decision to a reason. It should identify the injuries the work is likely to produce and estimate how long an ambulance would take to arrive, then explain why the chosen kits and first aider numbers fit those findings. Shift patterns belong in it too, because a first aider rostered only on day shift does nothing for an injury at 2am. South Australian businesses should also confirm whether the Automated External Defibrillators (Public Access) Act 2022 requires a defibrillator at their premises.
The protection only lasts while the document is current. The Code recommends reviewing first aid arrangements regularly in consultation with workers, and in particular when work practices change, when a new hazard comes to light, after an incident that needed first aid, and when the workforce grows or moves to a new site. An assessment that identified a risk years ago and was never revisited can work against the employer, because it proves the risk was known.
Does providing high-quality kits reduce liability risk?
They do, provided quality is measured by fit rather than price. An inspector or a court will ask whether the kit matched the assessed risks and was usable on the day it was needed. A kit built to AS 2675-1983 with contents aligned to the Model Code gives the business a recognised benchmark to point to, and add-on modules for burns or eye injuries tailor it to the hazards on site.
Quality also extends to the person using the kit. Equipment held by someone without current training is weak evidence of preparedness, so first aiders should hold HLTAID011 Provide First Aid, renewed every three years, with the CPR unit HLTAID009 refreshed annually. In practice the kit and the first aider are judged together.
Condition matters as much as contents. Sterile items carry expiry dates, and a kit stored in a hot vehicle or a damp shed can deteriorate well before the date printed on the label. The Code recommends checking each kit after every use, or at least once every 12 months if it is not used, against a signed and dated inventory.
Furthermore, a special duty is placed on the PCBU to ensure that all first aid kits are routinely inspected and maintained, and after a serious incident the inspection record is often one of the first documents an inspector or a claimant's lawyer asks for. SURVIVALSWAP replaces used and expiring items on a managed schedule and keeps a record of each restock, so the business holds a maintenance history built as it happened rather than pieced together afterwards.
Related Question
Can a workplace first aider be held personally liable for the help they give?
Claims against individual first aiders are rare. Most Australian jurisdictions have Good Samaritan provisions in their civil liability legislation that protect people who help in an emergency in good faith, although whether these extend to an employee whose role includes first aid is less settled. The more practical protection is vicarious liability. An employee who gives first aid as part of their job is acting in the course of employment, so a negligence claim over that treatment ordinarily lies against the employer rather than the individual. First aiders reduce their exposure by staying within their training and recording what they did. Employers support them by keeping qualifications current and the kit complete, since nobody should have to improvise around missing equipment.
Conclusion
Employer liability for first aid rests on the statutory duty to provide equipment and trained people, and on the common law duty of care that supports compensation claims when preparation falls short. Both are tested by the same evidence, namely a current risk assessment and a record showing that the kits it called for were kept complete. SURVIVAL supplies Australian workplace first aid kits built to AS 2675-1983, along with the modules and accessories needed to fit a kit to the risks your assessment identifies. If your assessment has not been reviewed since your workplace last changed, that is the place to start.