Since October 2024, every residential aged care facility in Australia has been legally required to deliver a minimum of 215 minutes of care per resident per day. Including 44 minutes from a registered nurse (RN). But meeting the target is only half the challenge. From 2026, external auditors will verify every minute you report. If you can't prove it, it didn't happen.
What the 215 Care Minutes Mandate Actually Requires
The 215 care minutes requirement was introduced as a direct response to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which found that many Australians in residential care were not receiving enough hands-on time from qualified staff. The government committed $2.5 billion to support the transition from the previous 200-minute standard, with the higher 215-minute target taking effect from 1 October 2024.
Care minutes can be delivered by registered nurses (RNs), enrolled nurses (ENs), and personal care workers (PCWs) or assistants in nursing (AINs). However, of the total 215 minutes, a minimum of 44 minutes must be delivered directly by a registered nurse. Management time only counts if the RN is directly overseeing or performing resident care activities, not general administration.
Providers must report their care minutes data quarterly to the Department of Health and Aged Care as part of the Aged Care Financial Report (ACFR). These figures feed directly into each facility's Star Rating on the My Aged Care website. The public-facing score that prospective residents and families use to evaluate providers.
Audits Are Now Mandatory And the Stakes Are High
Until recently, care minutes were largely self-reported. That changes with the introduction of mandatory external audits of Care Minutes Performance Statements, which became compulsory from 2026. These audits are conducted by accredited auditors in accordance with the ASAE 3000 assurance standard at the provider's own cost.
Auditors will reconcile reported care minute figures against source records including rosters, timesheets, payroll data, and agency invoices. Vague or unsubstantiated records will not be accepted.
Financial Consequence
Non-specialised residential aged care providers in metropolitan areas (MMM1) that fail to meet their care minutes targets face a funding reduction of up to $33.41 per resident per day. For a 100-bed facility, that's potentially over $1.2 million per year in lost revenue. In the April–June 2025 reporting period, 43% of metropolitan providers did not meet their required targets.
Beyond funding penalties, persistent non-compliance can result in enforceable undertakings, damage to Star Ratings, and in serious cases, regulatory action under the Aged Care Act 2024. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has already issued Enforceable Undertakings to 11 providers operating 27 individual homes.
"Every reported care minute must now be supported by verifiable evidence. Inaccuracies or shortfalls could affect a provider's Star Rating, result in funding penalties or trigger compliance action."
— Ageing Australia, December 2025
Why Your Nurse Call System Is Now a Compliance Tool
Most aged care providers think of nurse call systems as emergency response infrastructure. A way for residents to alert staff when they need help. That remains true. But under the current regulatory environment, a modern nurse call system is also one of the most powerful compliance evidence tools your facility has.
Here's why: every time a staff member responds to a call, that interaction is timestamped and logged. When your nurse call system is properly integrated with your rostering and care management platforms, those logs create a near-continuous, tamper-resistant record of direct care activity. Exactly the kind of verifiable evidence external auditors are looking for.
What good nurse call data can evidence
- Staff response times: timestamped records of when calls were raised and when staff responded, room by room
- Staff presence and movement: which staff were where, and for how long, across your facility
- Registered nurse activity: documented RN interactions that count toward the mandatory 44-minute RN component
- Call patterns and workload: data that supports workforce planning decisions and demonstrates care intensity
- Real-time reporting dashboards: live visibility of care minutes progress across the day and the quarter
Many aged care facilities are still running nurse call systems installed 10–15 years ago. These systems generate alerts and log calls, but the data is siloed, difficult to export, and incompatible with modern reporting tools. For these facilities, building an audit-ready evidence trail means manual reconciliation, which is exactly the kind of process that breaks under audit scrutiny.
— Tom Morley, General Manager @ Xacom
How ACQS 2025 Raises the Bar Further
The new Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards (ACQS 2025), which came into force in November 2025 as part of the new Aged Care Act 2024, significantly expand what providers must demonstrate to auditors. Call bell response performance is now directly referenced in compliance assessments against:
- Standard 3(3)(b) — Effective management of high-impact or high-prevalence risks for each resident
- Standard 7(3)(a) — Workforce planning that enables safe and quality care
- Standard 8(3)(d) — Effective risk management systems and practices
Under the new Star Ratings framework, a non-conformance finding in any of these standards can drop a facility's Compliance rating to 1 or 2 stars. A visible, public mark that can deter prospective residents from choosing your home. Recovering from a low compliance rating requires resolving the non-conformance and undergoing further assessment.
The implication is clear: facilities need nurse call systems that don't just respond to calls — they need systems that generate, store, and export structured data that maps to the quality standards auditors are checking against.
A Practical Audit Readiness Checklist
Before your next audit, run through this checklist for your nurse call and care documentation systems:
- Can you export timestamped call-and-response logs from your nurse call system by resident, by room, and by staff member - going back at least 12 months?
- Can you identify RN-specific interactions from your system logs, so you can demonstrate progress toward the 44-minute RN component?
- Do you have real-time dashboards that flag when your facility is tracking behind on daily care minutes targets before the end of the quarter?
- Are your call logs stored securely in a format that an external auditor can access and verify, rather than local files that could be altered?
- Have you reviewed hybrid and managerial roles to confirm which time genuinely qualifies as direct care and which doesn't?
When an auditor sits down with your Care Minutes Performance Statement, every figure on that document should be traceable back to a timestamped, system-generated record. Your nurse call platform should make that evidence retrieval a matter of pressing "export". Not hours of manual reconciliation.
How Xacom's Nurse Call System Supports Compliance
Xacom's next-generation nurse call platform was built with modern aged care compliance in mind. It goes far beyond alert management, providing the real-time reporting, data export, and system integration capabilities that care minutes compliance demands.
Real-time care minutes visibility
Xacom's dashboard gives facility managers a live view of care activity across the facility, updated throughout the day. You can see at a glance whether you're on track against your daily and quarterly targets and identify problem areas before they become audit findings.
Structured, exportable data
Every interaction in the Xacom system is logged with a timestamp, location, and staff identifier. Data can be exported in structured formats for reconciliation, giving you the clean audit trail that external auditors require under ASAE 3000.
Integration with existing systems
Xacom integrates with care management platforms, DECT telephone systems, and security infrastructure. Giving you a unified picture of staff activity across your facility, rather than fragmented logs across multiple systems.
24/7 Australian support
Our support team is based in Australia and available around the clock. If your system has an issue the night before an audit, you won't be waiting for an overseas helpdesk to open.