COVID-19 Public Health Orders/Directions For Australian Businesses

Businesses in all industries will be affected by the constantly changing public health orders for Covid-19. With restrictions beginning to ease, new orders will be released state-state that will have impacts on how businesses operate and maintain a safe working environment. It is important for business owners, managers and team leaders to stay up to date with the changing directions that affect them. Additionally, being prepared to effectively communicate this information with all of your staff will be critical. 

We have put together this guide on public health orders for you as a starting point to staying informed and compliant with the upcoming public health orders across Australia. We try our best to provide the most accurate information, but we still encourage you to follow the links on this page to your state authority for the most accurate and up to date information.  

What Covid restrictions will affect businesses?

Aligned with expert health recommendations on what the community must do to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Australian Governments have issued enforceable directions which put forward requirements and restrictions for businesses in each state and territory. These public health directions and orders may include topics such as:

• Directions for certain workers to be vaccinated by a set date
• Limits of public gatherings
• Physical distancing and density requirements (such as 1.5 metre distancing and 4 square meters of space per person)
• Limits and restrictions on operations, including types of business facilities remaining closed and limitation on activities 
• Hygiene, cleaning and signage requirements
• Risk management requirements such as COVIDSafe plans (or similar)
• Keeping records of contact details for the purposes of contact tracing
• Penalties and compliance

Public health directions and orders may differ from each state and territory or for each business. It is vitally important you review the directions which apply to your workplace. You can access relevant information for your state or territory by selecting it using the tabs at the top of this page.

Even if the public health directions and orders don’t apply to your workplace, you must still meet your work health and safety duties and limit the spread of COVID-19 where it is reasonably possible.

How to keep up with changing state public health orders

To keep up to date with the latest public health orders, it is important to navigate to your state or territory health department website. Each state or territory will be releasing new orders at different times so it is important that you stay informed with the right information. Keeping on top of the directions for your state or territory will ensure that you’re ready to implement changes asap to avoid costly business disruption or worse, penalties. 

What should employers be doing to prepare for public health order changes?

Stay informed

Keeping up to date with the latest news for your state will be crucial. For public health orders, it’s important that you refer to the primary source which is your local state department website. Each state will be updating their public health orders at different times so check the website regularly. You can use the links above to go straight to your state health departments website. 

Have an action plan

Having an action plan ensures you are always ready to respond to any incidents related to covid-19 in the workplace, as well as operate smoothly and safely. Incidents can quickly become legal nightmares if proper procedures and plans were not followed correctly.  

Be prepared for every scenario and make sure to document your plans well. For extensive business COVID-19 plans and resources, head to Safe Work Australia’s COVID-19 Information for Businesses

Be prepared to capture the right information for compliance

Businesses have and will continue to be asked to collect certain information on measures and procedures they are using to keep staff and employees safe. This information is required for your business to stay compliant with regulations, but also to make operating safely easy for all levels of your business. 

Knowing your obligations is one part, but getting it to your employees effectively is key. Make sure you understand what is required so you can effectively align your team with new procedures or measures.  

Access the latest business requirements, information and resources on your state business website using the tabs at the top of the page.

Our recommendations

Flexible frontline information capture

Systematizing data capture for your COVID-19 plan can help provide a solid foundation for organisational risk analysis and management of your frontline workers. The timely collection, distribution and storage of this data is crucial for making the right decision in the time of need.

We believe that safety needs to be adaptive to the situation at hand in the real world in order to keep people safe. Our platform gives safety officers, business owners, crew leaders and anyone overseeing a team an intuitive and adaptive platform to capture and monitor safety in real time.

We have a simple & customizable form building platform that allows managers to easily create unique safety documents of any kind. For those on the ground, there is no more messing around with finding templates and filling them in. Find and complete documents quicker in the field anytime.

Intuitive assessment and input of risks and other worksite factors using psychologically developed methods: no more confusion about the risk matrix! Give your workers a quicker, easier and more effective way to capture safety data that counts. 

Any safety or compliance document can be turned into a SafeWorkPro document for easy migration to a digital safety system. 

Transparent & Accountable Audit Trail

Easily pass your work health and safety audits with a defined and active process. The SafeWorkPro platform allows safety managers and business owners to see a real time snapshot of their business and the current risks that are being mitigated. Liveboards give you the ability to send push notifications to those responsible for handling safety documents and set alerts for any pre-defined metrics. Reduce threats of legal liability by having a clearly documented audit trail, without having to worry about a thing. 

1 touch audit export for super-fast and uninterrupted performance. You can export all relevant information for audits and checks whenever required from your site with 0 downtime or interruption. 

Summary

The steps in this plan will help you manage the impacts of changing public health orders in your state. It is up to you to stay informed and ready for the challenges that lay ahead. If you have found this list helpful, share it with others to help them prepare. 

SafeWorkPro aims to increase the efficiency of your safety system, as well as create a truly safer workplace for your employees. We want to keep people safe. If you would like to get in touch with a safety expert to discuss any concerns you might have about Covid-19 and your business, reach out today using the contact button below.