Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool (CDECT): The Complete Guide for Aged Care Providers
Compliance
July 19, 2026
Why regulated care providers must move beyond audit cycles and build real-time compliance systems.
If your aged care organisation has a renewal audit on the horizon, the Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool (CDECT) is about to become one of the most important documents you deal with. It sits alongside the Audit Evidence Collection Tool (AECT) in the renewal process, and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) uses it to see how your systems actually work on the frontline of care.
The CDECT has also just become more demanding. Under the Aged Care Act 2024, the Commission has expanded the volume of evidence providers must submit before the audit even opens — across workforce, infection prevention and control, equipment and lifestyle services.
This guide explains what the Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool is, how it differs for Category 4, 5 and 6 providers, what the recent changes mean, and how aged care providers can use Willow to automate CDECT readiness instead of assembling it by hand.
What Is the Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool (CDECT)?
The Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool (CDECT) is a regulatory assessment tool used by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. Where the AECT looks at your organisation-level systems, the CDECT looks at how consistently those systems are implemented in frontline care delivery — at the level of the individual home or care delivery location.
In other words, the CDECT is where a provider proves that its policies aren’t just written down, but are genuinely embedded and operating in the day-to-day delivery of safe, quality care to older people.
Providers submit the CDECT during renewal-of-registration audits under the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards. It requires extensive pre-audit documentation spanning workforce training, infection prevention and control (IPC), equipment maintenance, and lifestyle services — and, as we’ll see, that document list has recently grown.
CDECT by Registration Category: 4, 5 and 6
There are two versions of the CDECT, and how you complete it depends on your registration category:
CDECT – Care Delivery Location (Category 4 & 5) — for home and community-based care. Completed for a targeted sample of care delivery locations selected by the Commission.
CDECT – Residential (Category 6) — for residential aged care. Completed once for each approved residential care home.
This distinction matters a great deal for multi-site operators. A residential provider with 20 homes completes a CDECT for every one of them. A home care provider is assessed on a targeted sample of locations — but can’t know in advance exactly which locations the Commission will choose, so every location needs to be audit-ready.
The CDECT is always used together with the AECT during a renewal audit: the AECT proves the organisation-wide system exists, and the CDECT proves it lands consistently at each service.
What the CDECT Requires: Workforce, IPC, Equipment and Lifestyle
The CDECT asks for a broad, detailed body of evidence about how care is delivered at each service. The pre-audit documentation typically spans four major areas:
Workforce & training — pre-employment checks, qualifications and experience, induction manuals and training resources, and training/induction registers (including agency staff and subcontractors) covering the strengthened Standards
Infection Prevention & Control (IPC) — evidence the IPC Lead has completed required training, vaccination and immunisation records for workers and volunteers, and communication materials on infectious agents
Equipment & environment — records for beds, lifts, slings, wheelchairs, walkers and oxygen devices, plus audits of the service environment, equipment and aids
Lifestyle & services (residential) — information on the lifestyle needs of older people, cleaning and maintenance schedules, lifestyle staff meeting minutes and a lifestyle calendar
That’s a lot of evidence — pulled from HR systems, clinical software, maintenance logs, immunisation records and more — for every single home.
What’s Changed: More Documents, Earlier
The Commission has released an updated CDECT for Category 4, 5 and 6 providers, and the headline change is significant: a lot more evidence is now required up-front, before the audit opening meeting.
Category 4 & 5 CDECT — the pre-audit document list expanded from 24 to 32 items
Category 6 CDECT — the pre-audit document list expanded from 31 to 43 items
Several items that previously sat in the “during audit” list — such as training and competency records, and cleaning and maintenance records — have shifted to pre-audit submission
For residential, the nominated responsible person field is now split into four separate fields: name, position, phone and email
The direction of travel is clear: the Commission wants your workforce, IPC, equipment and lifestyle evidence reviewed before auditors arrive. That means tighter timelines, more coordination across HR, clinical and quality teams, and far less opportunity to pull documents together at the last minute.
Why the CDECT Is So Hard to Manage Manually
On its own, each CDECT document is manageable. The problem is scale and coordination. A typical provider faces:
Dozens of documents per home — and a separate CDECT for every residential home, or every sampled care location
Evidence scattered across systems — HR, rostering, clinical, maintenance and immunisation records rarely live in one place
Cross-team dependency — workforce, IPC, quality and facilities teams all own pieces of the puzzle
Freshness risk — training registers, vaccination records and equipment logs go stale fast, and the Commission wants current evidence
No single view of readiness — leadership can’t easily see which homes are audit-ready and which have gaps
With the document list now larger and moved earlier, the old approach — spreadsheets, shared drives and a pre-audit scramble — is riskier than ever.
How Willow Automates the CDECT
This is exactly what Willow was built for. Willow is an AI-powered compliance workspace for aged care, and its ACQS Renewal Readiness Module digitises the entire AECT and CDECT process into one structured, AI-assisted workflow — covering both residential care and home care from launch.
For the CDECT specifically, Willow gives you:
A separate CDECT document set per home — or per service region for home care — all managed under one organisation-wide renewal cycle
A CDECT document hub that links directly to your existing Willow records or accepts manual upload — with no duplicate uploads of evidence you already hold
A structured checklist mapped to the regulator’s current pre-audit requirements across workforce, IPC, equipment and lifestyle
An ownership matrix with four roles — Responsible Person, Standard Owner, Outcome Contributor and read-only Auditor — plus automated notifications so nothing falls through the cracks
Because the regulator documents are the source of truth, Willow’s workflow is built directly around the ACQSC’s own CDECT structure — not a reinterpretation of it.
AI Features, Freshness Traffic-Lights and a Live Readiness Dashboard
Where Willow removes the manual grind is in its AI and its live view of readiness — the two things a spreadsheet can never give you.
AI drafting with citations — Willow drafts CDECT responses, citing the specific evidence records that support each item, so you review and approve rather than write from scratch
Automated gap notes — the AI flags missing or thin evidence early, so gaps surface well before the audit deadline
No double entry — evidence already held in Willow is pulled through automatically and mapped to every item it supports
Readiness dashboard — a live view of coverage, freshness traffic-lights and owner attribution, so you know exactly which homes are audit-ready
Configurable review cadence — quarterly, six-monthly or annual reviews you set yourself, with owners automatically nudged and AI refreshing drafts on request
The freshness traffic-lights are particularly powerful for the CDECT, where training registers, vaccination records and equipment logs are exactly the kind of evidence that quietly goes out of date between audits.
One-Click Audit Pack, Ready for the Commission
When submission time arrives, Willow assembles a complete, regulator-ready audit pack in a single click — no last-minute collation, no missing documents. The pack includes:
The completed AECT workbook in the regulator format the ACQSC expects
A named and numbered CDECT document bundle for each home
An attestation cover page
The full review history behind every response
And because every renewal cycle ends with a locked, immutable snapshot, you retain a permanent, defensible record of exactly what you submitted and when — for every home, every cycle.
The Bottom Line
The Care Delivery Evidence Collection Tool is now a larger, earlier and higher-stakes part of every aged care renewal audit. For multi-home operators especially, managing it by hand — across dozens of homes and four evidence domains — is a genuine operational risk.
The providers who treat the CDECT as continuous, automated readiness — rather than a pre-audit scramble across scattered systems — are the ones who’ll walk into renewal audits with confidence.
If your renewal is approaching and the expanded CDECT is on your mind, that’s exactly the problem Willow solves. Book a 20-minute walkthrough and we’ll show you the Renewal Readiness Module handling both the AECT and CDECT end to end.
Written by
James Driscoll
Writer
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