Who Needs Training

A free reference published by SKLD Training, who sell the training it covers. What that means

A reference for clubs, committees and not-for-profits

Where your first aid duty actually comes from

Most organisations are told they must have a first aider. Far fewer are told which rule says so, or whether that rule is law at all. This reference answers both, one instrument at a time, and tells you when the honest answer is that nothing requires it.

If you sit on a committee, run a club or manage a small not-for-profit, you have probably been handed a policy template with a blank space for the number of first aiders you need. The template rarely says where the number comes from. Training providers will tell you that you need training, which is true often enough, but they are also selling it.

There are only four places an Australian first aid obligation can come from. Working out which one applies to you takes about five minutes, and it changes the answer completely.

The four sources of an obligation

  1. Work health and safety law

    If your organisation is a person conducting a business or undertaking, usually shortened to PCBU, you have a duty to provide first aid that is adequate for your workplace. That duty is real and enforceable.

    The part almost nobody tells community organisations is that a volunteer association which does not employ anybody is not a PCBU, and the work health and safety laws do not apply to it. Employ one paid person and that changes immediately.

    Work out whether WHS law applies to your organisation

  2. A regulation or scheme standard that names your sector

    Some sectors have a rule that names first aid specifically, with a provision you can quote. Education and care services are the clearest example. Others that are widely assumed to have one, including aged care and the NDIS, do not, and that surprises people.

    See which instruments name a sector, and which do not

  3. A condition somebody attaches to you

    Funding agreements, insurance policies, venue hire terms, affiliation rules from a state or national sporting body, and licence conditions can each require first aid training whether or not any law does. These are contractual, they vary between organisations, and they are the most commonly missed source. Nobody can tell you what yours say except the body that wrote them.

  4. Nothing requires it

    For a genuinely volunteer-run group with no employees, no funding conditions, no affiliation requirements and no sector regulation, there may be no instrument at all that requires a first aid certificate. That is a legitimate finding and it is worth knowing. It does not mean nobody should be trained. It means the decision is yours to make on the actual risk of what you do, rather than a compliance obligation you are failing.

The practical point

Sources two, three and four are the ones that catch people out. An organisation can be entirely outside work health and safety law and still be firmly required to train people, because a funding agreement says so. The opposite also happens.

Start with your situation

What this reference does differently

Every figure on this site carries the document it came from and the date it was checked. Where a number is a recommendation rather than a legal requirement, it says so in the same sentence. Where an obligation that is widely assumed to exist does not exist, that gets its own entry rather than being quietly skipped.

Every requirement on this site carries one of three labels Required Named in legislation or a regulation Recommended Guidance only, such as a code of practice Depends on you Turns on your own circumstances or agreements

Three examples of the difference, each covered in full on its own page:

What is commonly said, and what the source documents say
Commonly said What the source actually says Status
Every organisation with volunteers has work health and safety duties A volunteer association that employs nobody is not a PCBU and the model WHS laws do not apply to it Depends on you
A first aid certificate is legally valid for three years and CPR expires after twelve months Those intervals are recommendations in a model Code of Practice, not statutory expiry. They bind you only where something else adopts them Recommended
Annual CPR refresher training keeps your team competent ANZCOR Guideline 10.1 states that retraining cycles of 12 to 24 months are likely insufficient to maintain high quality performance Recommended

That last row is inconvenient for the organisation publishing this page, which sells annual refresher training. It is here because it is what the guideline says.

Where this comes from

Safe Work Australia, work health and safety duties for volunteers. Safe Work Australia, model Code of Practice: First aid in the workplace. Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation, Guideline 10.1, Basic Life Support Training. All checked 9 September 2026. Full detail on the sources page.

What this reference is not

It is not legal advice, and it cannot be. It points you at public instruments and tells you what they say, so that you can read them yourself or take them to somebody who advises you. Where a question turns on the specific facts of your organisation, that is where this reference stops and says so.

It also does not cover clinical first aid. There is nothing here about how to perform CPR or treat a burn, because the Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation publishes that material for free and better than anyone else could.

Who publishes this

This reference is published by SKLD Training, which delivers first aid and CPR training to workplaces and community organisations, on behalf of Allens Training Pty Ltd, RTO 90909. We sell the thing this page discusses. Nothing here is gated, no email address is required to read it, and where the honest answer is that you are not required to train anybody, the page says that. Read the full disclosure.

All instruments on this page checked 9 September 2026.