Complaints Management Under the New Aged Care Act: What Providers Need to Change
Compliance
March 29, 2026
Why regulated care providers must move beyond audit cycles and build real-time compliance systems.
Complaints management has always been a cornerstone of quality aged care, but the new Aged Care Act has raised the bar significantly. With strengthened rights for older people, enhanced regulatory oversight, and a clear expectation that complaints drive continuous improvement, providers can no longer treat complaints handling as a reactive, paper-based exercise. This guide breaks down the key changes, practical steps for compliance, and how forward-thinking providers are building complaints systems that genuinely improve care.
What's Actually Changed Under the New Act
The new Aged Care Act places the rights of older people at its centre — and that extends directly to how complaints are received, managed, and resolved. Key changes include:
A statutory right to complain without fear of retribution, enshrined in the Statement of Rights
Strengthened obligations for providers to have accessible, culturally safe complaints processes
Explicit requirements to use complaints data for systemic improvement, not just individual resolution
Greater powers for the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to investigate complaints handling failures
Mandatory acknowledgement and response timeframes that providers must document and demonstrate
The shift is clear: complaints aren't problems to be managed — they're signals that should drive better care. Providers who haven't updated their complaints frameworks since the Act commenced are already behind.
Building an Accessible Complaints Intake Process
Accessibility is no longer optional — it's a compliance requirement. Your complaints process needs to work for everyone, including people with cognitive impairment, those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and family members or representatives acting on someone's behalf.
Practically, this means offering multiple channels for lodging complaints: verbal (in person or by phone), written, and digital. It means having translated materials available and ensuring frontline staff are trained to recognise and receive complaints — even when they're not framed as formal complaints.
One of the most common audit findings is that providers have a complaints policy on paper but haven't made the process genuinely accessible to the people who need it most. Walk through your facility or service with fresh eyes: could a resident with limited English actually figure out how to raise a concern?
Acknowledgement, Timeliness, and Documentation
Under the strengthened standards, providers must acknowledge complaints promptly and keep complainants informed throughout the process. While there's no single mandated timeframe for resolution, the Commission expects providers to demonstrate reasonable timeliness — and to document every step.
Best practice looks like:
Acknowledge receipt within 24 hours (in writing where possible)
Provide an estimated timeframe for investigation and resolution
Give regular updates, especially if timelines change
Document the outcome and any actions taken, and share this with the complainant
Record whether the complainant is satisfied with the resolution
This level of documentation can feel burdensome, but it's exactly what assessors look for during compliance reviews. Providers using digital compliance platforms can automate reminders, track timeframes, and maintain a complete audit trail without relying on manual follow-up.
Investigation: Getting It Right Without Overcomplicating It
Not every complaint requires a formal investigation — but every complaint requires an appropriate response. The key is having a triage process that matches the response to the severity and complexity of the issue.
For straightforward concerns (a meal preference not being met, a scheduling mix-up), a quick resolution and follow-up may be all that's needed. For more serious matters — allegations of abuse, systemic failures, clinical incidents — a structured investigation with clear terms of reference, evidence gathering, and findings is essential.
Common mistakes providers make in investigations:
Conflating complaints with SIRS-reportable incidents and losing track of obligations for each
Failing to separate the investigator from the subject of the complaint
Not interviewing the complainant as part of the investigation
Reaching conclusions without documented evidence
The goal is proportionality: thorough enough to be defensible, practical enough to actually get done.
Open Disclosure and the Duty of Candour
The new Act strengthens expectations around open disclosure — being honest with older people and their families when something goes wrong. This isn't just good practice; it's increasingly a regulatory expectation.
Open disclosure in the complaints context means being upfront about what happened, what you've found during investigation, and what you're doing to prevent recurrence. It means apologising when appropriate, without legal hedging that makes the apology meaningless.
Providers sometimes worry that open disclosure creates legal risk. In practice, the opposite is often true: complaints that are met with transparency and genuine accountability are far less likely to escalate to the Commission or result in regulatory action. It's the cover-ups and deflections that create real risk.
"The providers who handle complaints best are the ones who see them as gifts — uncomfortable, sometimes, but gifts nonetheless. Every complaint is someone telling you where you can improve."
From Individual Complaints to Systemic Improvement
This is where most providers fall short — and where assessors are increasingly focused. Resolving individual complaints is necessary but not sufficient. The new standards expect providers to analyse complaints data for patterns and trends, and to feed those insights into their continuous improvement processes.
Ask yourself:
Do you track complaint categories and volumes over time?
Can you identify which services, locations, or shifts generate the most complaints?
Are complaint trends discussed at governance and quality meetings?
Have any systemic changes been made as a direct result of complaint analysis?
If you can't answer yes to most of these, there's a gap. Technology plays a critical role here — centralised complaint registers with tagging and reporting capabilities make it possible to spot trends that would be invisible in a paper-based or spreadsheet system. The providers getting this right are the ones using their data, not just collecting it.
Protecting Complainants and Building Trust
The Statement of Rights is explicit: older people have the right to raise concerns without fear of retribution. For providers, this means having clear anti-retaliation policies, training staff on what retribution looks like (it's not always overt — it can be subtle changes in attitude or care), and creating a culture where feedback is genuinely welcomed.
This is cultural work as much as compliance work. If staff see complaints as personal attacks rather than opportunities to improve, the culture needs to shift. Regular training, leadership modelling, and celebrating examples where complaints led to positive changes all help.
For home care and community providers, there's an additional dimension: clients may fear that complaining will result in losing their services. Providers need to proactively address this fear, reassuring clients and families that raising concerns is safe and encouraged.
Practical Steps to Get Audit-Ready
If your complaints management system hasn't been reviewed since the new Act commenced, now is the time. Here's a practical checklist:
Review and update your complaints policy to reflect new Act requirements and the strengthened standards
Ensure your complaints process is accessible — multiple channels, translated materials, easy to find
Implement (or audit) your triage framework for matching responses to complaint severity
Check your documentation trail — can you demonstrate acknowledgement, investigation steps, outcomes, and follow-up for every complaint?
Set up trend reporting — even a monthly summary of complaint categories and volumes is a good start
Train all staff (not just management) on receiving complaints and the anti-retaliation policy
Link complaints to your continuous improvement register so assessors can see the feedback loop in action
Getting complaints management right isn't just about avoiding regulatory findings — it's about building a service that older people and their families actually trust. The providers who treat complaints as a core quality function, not an administrative burden, are the ones who'll thrive under the new regulatory environment.
Written by
James Driscoll
Writer
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