As Ozcare expanded its home care services across regional Queensland, its instructor-led training model created significant delays, with new staff waiting up to six weeks before feeling confident in delivering care. By partnering with Ausmed, they transformed onboarding from a six-week bottleneck into a five to seven-day launchpad, empowering lone workers across vast distances with education at their point of care.

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"This wasn't just a system switch, it was a shift in how we support our workforce - and ultimately, how confident our clients feel in the care we provide."

Nick Hansen, Chief Operating Officer | Community Living

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When scale demands a new approach

Ozcare's footprint tells the story; from the Gold Coast to north of Cairns, west to Emerald and across some of Queensland's most remote communities. In regional aged care, workers often travel one to two hours each way to their workplace. They work alone in clients' homes, without the safety net of nearby colleagues to consult.

Before Ausmed, the education model simply wasn't built for this reality.

Training was instructor-led, scheduled in physical locations. New staff couldn't start until they'd completed the mandatory sessions, which meant waiting for the next available class. Those delays stacked up quickly. Six weeks became standard. For regional workers eager to start making a difference, the message was clear: wait.

"We often weren't confident to put new staff out into the field without ensuring we had a really competent baseline of education under their belt," said Nick. "But that lag time meant we were losing people before they even started."

Ozcare’s content library posed its own challenge. Keeping materials current took constant resourcing. Topics drifted slightly out of date. There was nothing that felt like a true educational framework - something Ozcare could point to and say, 'This is how we ensure our workforce is prepared.'

"It was always sort of semi-out of date," Nick recalled. "It was never at the forefront of best practice."

And the impact went beyond logistics. When staff don't feel prepared, it shows. When they didn’t have access to learning that builds confidence, that uncertainty rippled outward.

"If we feel that we don't have prepared and confident staff who aren't supported from a learning perspective well enough," said Nick, "we then see that resonate through clients' confidence in us as a service provider as well."

For an organisation delivering care to vulnerable older Australians - many of whom have no family nearby - that confidence gap was unacceptable.

Phase 1: Speed to capability

Ozcare's partnership with Ausmed began with a focused question: What would it take to get new staff ready in days, not weeks?

The answer started with access. By shifting from instructor-led sessions to Ausmed's on-demand library, new employees could begin learning immediately—on their own schedule, at their own pace, wherever they were.

No waiting for the next available class. No travel to a central location. No delay between accepting the role and feeling prepared to do it.

"Fast forward now after implementation of Ausmed," said Nick, "we see staff being onboarded within five to seven days. They're ready to go, itching to go, to be able to get out into the community and really start to make a difference."

From six weeks to five-seven days. That's not just faster - it's fundamentally different.

The shift unlocked something else: enthusiasm. New staff who'd been eager to start could now channel that energy immediately. Instead of sitting through weeks of scheduled training, they could dive into the work that brought them to aged care in the first place.

And for Ozcare's workforce, spread across hundreds of kilometres, the flexibility mattered. Regional staff could complete training modules between shifts, during downtime, or in the evenings, fitting education into lives that often involve long commutes and unpredictable schedules.

"Being a large home care provider, the remote workforce and the mobile workforce are really important to us," Nick explained. "Being able to deliver content to our workforce wherever and whenever they choose is a huge advantage."

The retention connection

Speed wasn't the only goal. Ozcare, like many aged care providers, saw churn in the first 6 to 12 months—staff who didn't feel supported left. The question became: What if better onboarding could change that?

"We're either not delivering on a promise that we've made to them from day one of employment," said Nick, "or we haven't supported them well enough through that learning journey."

With Ausmed, Ozcare designed a more intentional onboarding experience —one that didn't just front-load training in the first week and then abandon staff. The platform enabled a bespoke learning journey that extended through the critical first six months, then carried into the next six.

"Ausmed's really helping us ensure that we really support them within that first six months of employment, and then don't let them down moving into the 12-month mark."

For a workforce of 1,500 across regional Queensland, that structure created consistency. Every new hire, regardless of location, received the same foundational education - and ongoing support to grow with the role.

Phase 2: Preparing for reform - The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards

Ozcare's adoption of Ausmed wasn't just about onboarding. It was about readiness.

"A key driver for us in joining or partnering with Ausmed when we did was around being ready for the Strengthened Standards," said Nick. "How are we actually turning these new workers into a really confident and capable workforce to deliver on our mission and values as an organisation?"

The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards represented a significant shift in how quality care would be defined—and demonstrated. For Ozcare, with 4,800 staff members across regional and metropolitan areas, the challenge was clear: How do we ensure everyone understands their obligations under the new standards, and what does quality care look like in the eyes of the consumer?

The Ausmed Library™ became the answer. With over 1,200 modules covering everything from foundational skills to advanced practice, Ozcare could map specific learning pathways to the new standards.

"When we looked at different partners, the Ausmed content really resonated with us purely in the way it was delivered," said Nick. "We have shorter, more punchy content delivered to our frontline workforce. And then we've got more in-depth education modules for our managers and support roles as well."

This differentiation mattered. Frontline care workers needed education that they could quickly digest and apply immediately. Managers, on the other hand, required more in-depth examinations of policy, risk management, and compliance. Ausmed's structure supported both.

The feedback from staff was immediate and consistent.

"One word: easy," said Nick. "It's just been so easy for the workforce to be able to understand what they need to do, when they need to do it. It doesn't leave them wondering with further questions."

Phase 3: Supporting lone workers at the point of care

With onboarding streamlined and standards compliance underway, Ozcare turned its attention to a deeper challenge: how to support staff who work entirely alone.

In residential aged care, workers can turn to colleagues, debrief after difficult moments, and learn from one another in real time. In-home care - especially across regional Queensland - that's not possible.

"Within the home care environment, you're a real lone worker," said Nick. "It's very difficult to talk to your colleagues, to unpack anything that's happening, and to learn from each other."

This isolation posed risks - not just to staff wellbeing, but to care quality. Without structures for reflective practice, workers had no easy way to process challenging situations or confirm they'd handled something correctly.

"One thing I'm really focused on at the moment is looking at reflective practice," said Nick. "How can we best support a remote workforce to be able to reflect on the practice and reflect on any events they might have had within a service they've just delivered?"

Ausmed's platform enabled something new: education delivered directly to employees at their point of care. After a challenging shift, a worker in Emerald (a four-hour drive from the nearest major city) could access targeted modules on de-escalation, palliative care communication, or whatever the situation demanded.

"By partnering with Ausmed, it's really exciting that we can deliver the education directly to our employees at their point of care, but also now start to really dig into the Library and look at different themes and different experiences from our workforce to kind of design a more bespoke experience for them."

Ozcare is now exploring how to use the Library to create learning pathways triggered by specific experiences - not just scheduled training, but responsive education that meets staff where they are, when they need it most.

Phase 4: From customer to partner

As Ozcare's confidence with the platform grew, something shifted. This wasn't just a vendor relationship. It was a partnership.

"To actually move from being a customer to a partner for me is quite a sizable shift," said Nick. "That's certainly something that I saw in Ausmed when we started to really unpack the potential for AI, the potential for further technologies to really wrap around and support even just the small micro-needs of our workforce."

Those "small micro-needs" matter enormously when you're a lone worker in the middle of Western Queensland, delivering care every day. Access to just-in-time education isn't a nice-to-have - it's essential.

And Ausmed's investment in the sector resonated beyond the product itself.

"[With Ausmed], there's that real investment in the industry, not around looking for customers," Nick explained. "It's something that really resonated in terms of thinking outside of the box and looking to go, well, we can just deliver content, we can deliver a great platform - but what else could we do together?"

That forward-looking approach aligned with Ozcare's own priorities as they worked through aged care reforms, particularly Support at Home.

"For us, it's really around understanding our service model, redefining our service model. And a really important pillar of that is our workforce capability."

With Ausmed, Ozcare found a partner willing to innovate alongside them - not just deliver a product, but co-create solutions for the unique challenges of regional home care.

Looking ahead

Ozcare now runs its training and compliance programs through a single, connected platform:

• New staff on board in less than a week.
• Frontline workers access education at their point of care.
• Managers have visibility into who has completed what training and when.

But Nick and his team aren't stopping there.

They're currently working through many of the aged care reforms, with a particular focus on Support at Home. Workforce capability remains central to that work - and Ausmed continues to be a core partner in building it.

The opportunity ahead: using Ausmed Library™ to create even more targeted learning experiences based on worker type, service type, and individual development needs.

"The broader library of content is the real draw for us," said Nick. "We can really delve deep into the over 1,200 different modules and content to understand what baseline the majority of our workforce needs to be at, what we wrap around them, and what more learning opportunities we can offer to them as individuals."

For Ozcare, this isn't about checking compliance boxes. It's about building a workforce capable of delivering exceptional care - even when working entirely alone, across some of Australia's most remote communities.