Aged care electrical sits between medical and high-stakes commercial work. Clinical wings carry AS/NZS 3003 patient-area scope; the rest is ordinary commercial wiring made harder by the fact that the building runs 24/7 and the residents can't be sent home for the duration. We do fit-out work for new wings and refurbishments, compliance upgrades against the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission standards, and rectification work after an accreditation visit has flagged defects.
Working in an occupied facility
Most of what we do in operating facilities runs around the residents, not against them. Resident-wing work is after-hours or scheduled into the gap between meal service and personal-care visits. Common-area work in corridors, lounges, dining rooms and kitchens runs during the day with the affected area cordoned. We brief the facility manager on the isolation plan and the work zones before any quote is signed, and we don't enter or close off a room with a resident in it. For larger jobs we stage the work so one wing is the focus for the week and then move on. Staff find that easier to brief residents on than a rolling all-corridor approach.
Nurse-call and emergency systems
We install the electrical infrastructure that nurse-call systems sit on: dedicated power supplies, cable pathways, back-of-wall conduit and panel-cabinet locations. The nurse-call specialist commissions the head-end and the call points; we coordinate with them on the wiring layout before rough-in so the system goes in clean. Emergency and exit lighting under AS/NZS 2293 is more involved in aged care than in ordinary commercial buildings. Residents may need to be moved during a power failure, so the lighting and signage have to be sized for assisted egress, not just able-bodied evacuation.
Backup power for medication and life-support
The most common backup-power request is for medication fridges, the comms cabinet and the nurse-call head-end. A sized UPS in the medication room or comms cupboard usually covers it, with runtime matched to the longest plausible eastern-suburbs outage. Larger facilities with high-care wings need an automatic transfer switch back to a generator: we install the transfer switch and the facility-side wiring, and the generator unit, slab and fuel come from a specialist we work alongside. For sites that can't justify a generator, a larger UPS on the critical-load circuits usually covers the realistic outage profile without a fixed gen-set.
Dementia-unit considerations
Memory and dementia wings have specific electrical accessories. GPOs are tamper-resistant or recessed and shutter-protected. Door interlocks for secured exits get dedicated power and a documented bypass procedure for emergency egress. Switch and dimmer placement keeps light-source control out of resident reach in shared rooms. We handle the installation; the broader memory-care behavioural design is set by your clinical and design teams, and we install what they specify.
Audit-ready documentation
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission accreditation visit looks at the electrical paper trail like any other auditor: Certificates of Electrical Safety, smoke-alarm functional test records, emergency-lighting test logs, RCD trip-time records on demand, and any AS/NZS 3003 compliance documentation for patient-area-classified rooms. We hand the full set over as one PDF on completion of the work and again whenever the audit cycle requires it. See our commercial safety inspections for the broader compliance scope.
Standards the work meets
Every job meets AS/NZS 3000 as a baseline, with AS/NZS 3003 applied to any clinical patient-area-classified rooms, AS/NZS 2293 for emergency lighting, and AS 3786 for smoke alarms across the building. A Certificate of Electrical Safety is lodged with Energy Safe Victoria for every job.