Manual Handling Training for Home Care Workers
In home care the workplace is someone's home. You cannot redesign it, the equipment is whatever the client has, and there is usually nobody else there. The tasks are familiar from residential care, including showering, transfers, repositioning, helping someone walk and household work, but the controls you can rely on are different, and so is the judgement you need about when a task should not go ahead. This page covers the hazards specific to homes, how to work alone with the client's equipment, and how reporting gets a home changed.
Last reviewed September 2026 · Applies to the Manual Handling Training for Aged Care Workers course.
The client's home is your workplace
Work health and safety duties do not stop at the front door. Safe Work Australia is explicit that the duty to keep workers safe applies wherever they work, including a patient's home and a vehicle travelling between work sites, and that community care workers need to be able to review hazards and put controls in place at each home they visit. Your employer's duty to give you information, training, instruction and supervision goes with you to every address on your roster.
In-home aged care has also changed. The Support at Home program started on 1 November 2025, replacing the Home Care Packages Program and Short-Term Restorative Care, and the Commonwealth Home Support Program is due to move across no earlier than 1 July 2027. Support at Home includes a short-term pathway for assistive technology and home modifications, one of the routes by which an equipment gap you report can be closed.
Hazards specific to home care
Homes are built for living, not for care. The hazards are usually in the layout rather than in any one task, and they tend to be the same on every visit until someone reports them.
- Low beds, and beds against walls, so you cannot work from both sides or at a safe height
- Narrow bathrooms, steps into showers, shower screens and slippery floors
- Rugs, cables, clutter and thick carpet that stop wheels and catch feet
- Stairs, front steps and sloping driveways between the door and the car
- Equipment that is old, unserviced, the wrong size or missing
- Pets, visitors and family members who try to help during a transfer
- Car transfers, and lifting walkers or folding wheelchairs into a boot
Working alone with what the client has
Because you are usually the only worker, planning happens before you start. On a first visit, look at the bed height, the space around it, the bathroom, the floor surfaces, the route to the car and where the equipment is kept. On every visit, ask how the client is today and watch how they move before you assist. A client who managed the step into the shower last week may not manage it after a fall, an illness or a hospital stay.
Use the equipment in the care plan and check it first: brakes, battery, sling condition, shower chair frame and footplates. If a transfer needs equipment the home does not have, or two workers when you are alone, the task does not become a one-person lift. Offer what can be done safely, such as a wash at the basin instead of a shower, and ring your coordinator. Safe Work Australia lists scheduling to minimise working alone and supervising workers in the community among the controls employers are expected to use; your check-in procedure and on-call line are part of that system.
Reporting so the home changes
In home care, reporting is the main way a hazard gets fixed. A coordinator cannot see that the bed has been pushed back against the wall, that the client is now reluctant to stand, or that the shower chair wobbles. Record it in your employer's system, not only by text message, and say what you think is needed: an occupational therapy review, a bed that adjusts, a second worker or a change to the care plan.
Under the Aged Care Code of Conduct, workers must promptly raise and act on concerns about the quality and safety of care, and the Serious Incident Response Scheme covers home services as well as residential care. This course covers the reasoning behind those reports. Module 3, Identifying Hazardous Manual Tasks, and Module 4, Risk Assessment and Risk Controls, apply directly to assessing an environment you do not control. Module 6, People Handling in Aged Care, covers changes in mobility between visits, and Module 8, Reporting, Incidents and Ongoing Safety, covers what to report and how. Practical training on each client's equipment remains your employer's responsibility.
Covered in the course
Common questions
Sources
- Safe Work Australia — Model Code of Practice: Hazardous manual tasks — The national code the state and territory regulators adopt or mirror.
- Safe Work Australia — Lifting, pushing and pulling (manual tasks)
- Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission — Provider standards that sit alongside WHS duties in aged care.
General information about Australian work health and safety duties, not legal advice. Your employer’s procedures and the regulator in your state take precedence.
Ready to start?
Work through the course and the assessment at your own pace. You only pay A$49 if you pass and want the certificate.
Take the Assessment