For twenty eight years, the Australian Standard for patient alarm systems described a very simple idea. A person in a bed presses a button. A light comes on above a door. Somebody walks down a corridor to see what is wrong.
That standard, AS 3811, was published in 1998[1]. It was a fair description of nurse call as it existed then, and it has quietly shaped every system installed in this country since.
On 5 June 2026, Standards Australia published AS 3811:2026[2]. It is the first comprehensive rewrite in almost three decades[3], and it is not a tidy up. It changes what a nurse call system is understood to be. The title alone makes the point. The 1998 edition covered hard-wired patient alarm systems[1]. The 2026 edition covers hard-wired consumer communication and alarm systems for use in healthcare facilities[2].
We think this is one of the most progressive things to happen to our sector in years, and we want to explain why.
From an alarm to a care system
The old standard was built around alerting. The new one is built around care.
AS 3811:2026 recognises that a call system is no longer a bell. It is the layer that carries clinical workflow: routing the right event to the right person, coordinating a team across a shift, integrating with clinical records, following a clinician onto a mobile device, and producing data that tells a provider something useful about how care is actually being delivered.
The principles running through the new standard are connected care, interoperability, cybersecurity, resilience and workflow optimisation[3]. Read that list again and notice how little of it is about a button.
Four changes stand out to us.
- Interoperability is now an expectation, not a bonus. The standard anticipates systems that talk to clinical and electronic records, to mobile devices, and to the other technology in a facility[3]. Closed, proprietary systems that trap data inside a server in a comms room are now working against the direction of the standard, not with it.
- Automation is recognised as legitimate care. The new standard makes room for presence detection, automatic cancellation of a call when a carer attends, real time location and situational awareness, and fall and risk event detection that escalates on its own. This matters more than it sounds. Every one of those functions removes a manual step from a carer who does not have the time, and every one of them produces a timestamp that would otherwise never have been recorded.
- Cybersecurity is treated as clinical safety. It is no longer an IT matter to be handled somewhere else in the organisation[3]. If a call system carries resident data and connects to a network, its security is part of whether residents are safe. And if nurse call is going to interoperate and share data with other technology, every system in that chain needs to be certified.
- The scope of a standard install has widened. AS 3811:2026 applies to hospitals, residential aged care facilities and mental health units[2], acknowledging that the escalation, duress and behavioural support needs of those environments are genuinely different from an acute hospital ward. Variations in nurse call for aged care have been around for a long time. What is new is fall detection, automated presence, wanderer management with real time location, and two way voice triage being treated as standard and recommended. That is not what most traditional nurse call vendors offer as standard.
What has not changed is the insistence on resilience. Life safety functions still need independence, redundancy and fail-safe behaviour[3]. Connected does not mean fragile, and the standard is right to hold that line.
The gap nobody is talking about
There is a second standard in this conversation, and it has not moved.
AS 4607 covers personal response systems used in independent living, retirement villages and private homes. It is still the 1999 edition, and Standards Australia still lists it as current[4]. It sets sound requirements for battery life, transmission reliability, monitoring centre response times and escalation procedures, and those requirements still matter.
But it describes a world where a resident presses a button and a monitoring centre answers. It does not contemplate a system that notices a resident has not got out of bed, or that their night time bathroom trips have tripled over three weeks, or that a fall has already happened and nobody has pressed anything.
That is the real gap. In residential care, the standard now expects sensing, automation and data. In the independent living unit across the car park, the governing standard still assumes a person is conscious, capable and wearing their pendant. In many respects that person needs automated, predictive and proactive care technology more than the resident who is already receiving rounding visits several times a day.
Older Australians move across that line constantly. The technology should not fall off a cliff when they do.
Why the timing makes this urgent
AS 3811:2026 did not arrive in a vacuum. It landed in the middle of the biggest regulatory reset the sector has seen.
The Aged Care Act 2024 commenced on 1 November 2025, bringing the strengthened Quality Standards with it[5]. Standard 4 requires that equipment is safe, appropriate and well-maintained[6]. A call system that is twenty years old, unsupported, or unable to evidence its own performance is now a compliance question, not just a maintenance one.
Under the same Act, data protection sits at board level. Health service providers were the largest single source of notifiable data breaches in Australia in the second half of 2024, with 121 notifications, 20 per cent of every breach reported to the Information Commissioner[7]. Every connected device in a building is part of that risk picture.
Workforce pressure has not eased either. Providers must deliver 215 care minutes per resident per day, including 44 minutes of registered nurse time, with a registered nurse on site 24 hours a day[8]. From 1 April 2026, care funding for non-specialised metropolitan homes is linked to the care minutes they actually deliver, through the care minutes supplement[8]. Any system that generates false alarms, forces a carer to walk to a panel to cancel a call, or cannot show where time is actually going, is now costing money as well as goodwill.
And the outcomes have not improved on their own. In the January to March 2026 quarter, 31.1 per cent of residents in Australian aged care homes experienced at least one fall[9]. Across the nineteen quarters to March 2026, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found no statistically significant change in that figure at all[9]. Waiting for someone to press a button has never been a falls strategy.
In home care, the picture is changing too. Support at Home commenced on 1 November 2025[10]. Personal emergency alarm systems, and localising and tracking systems, are now prescribed items on the Assistive Technology and Home Modifications list[12], funded separately from a participant’s quarterly budget[11]. There is now a funded pathway to put better technology into people’s homes, not just into buildings.
What to ask before you upgrade
If your community is looking at a nurse call replacement in the next two years, these are the questions we would put to any vendor, including us.
- Can we get at our own data through a documented, secure and open interface, or is it locked in a server on site?
- What happens automatically, with no staff action? Presence, cancellation, inactivity monitoring, fall detection, escalation?
- What can you tell us about a resident’s pattern over six months, not just the last alarm? Do you know how their sleep, toileting or activity has changed?
- How is the system secured, patched and supported, and who is accountable when it is not? Do you hold ISO 27001, SOC 2 or equivalent certification?
- What still works when the network, the internet or the power goes down? Can you do more than put a light above a door?
- Does the same platform follow a resident from independent living into assisted living and residential care, or do we run two systems and two support contracts?
- Can it evidence response times, staffing, escalation and the complexity of a resident’s care needs without somebody building a spreadsheet by hand?
If a vendor cannot answer those, the system is being sold to the 1998 standard.
What we took away
We have built eevi around the ideas this standard has now formally endorsed: open rather than proprietary, sensing rather than waiting, and data that turns into proactive intervention rather than a monthly report nobody opens.
It is genuinely encouraging to see a standard catch up to that thinking, and to see Standards Australia treat interoperability, automation and security as questions of care quality rather than technical preferences.
The rewrite gives providers something they have not had before: a credible reason to stop patching a system designed for a different era, and a clear description of what proper care technology looks like instead.
eeviCare is modular, cloud-based and purpose-built for the continuum of care, not adapted from a hospital system. It is Australian-owned, trusted today by more than 100 communities and monitoring over 10,000 lives across Australia.
Visit eevi.life or call 1300 802 738.
Sources
- AS 3811-1998, Hard-wired patient alarm systems (superseded), Standards Australia store: store.standards.org.au
- AS 3811:2026, Hard-wired consumer communication and alarm systems for use in healthcare facilities, published 5 June 2026, Standards Australia store: store.standards.org.au
- New AS 3811:2026 Standard: a blueprint for the future of connected care, Rauland Australia, 6 July 2026: rauland.com.au
- AS 4607-1999, Personal response systems, listed as current, Standards Australia store: store.standards.org.au
- Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, in effect 1 November 2025, Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission: agedcarequality.gov.au
- Strengthened Quality Standards, Standard 4 The environment, Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission: agedcarequality.gov.au
- Notifiable Data Breaches Report, July to December 2024, Table 5, Office of the Australian Information Commissioner: oaic.gov.au
- Care minutes and 24/7 registered nurses in residential aged care, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: health.gov.au
- Residential Aged Care Quality Indicators, January to March 2026, Table 1.1 data tables, AIHW GEN: gen-agedcaredata.gov.au
- Support at Home program, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: health.gov.au
- Assistive Technology and Home Modifications (AT-HM) scheme, Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: health.gov.au
- Assistive Technology and Home Modifications list (AT-HM list), Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: health.gov.au