WorkSafe Victoria issued a safety alert on Thursday 23 July reminding healthcare employers of their obligations to control the risks associated with electrically powered mobile equipment — including beds, hoists, patient lifters and similar devices — in hospital and healthcare settings.

The regulator is directing healthcare providers to implement routine visual inspection of leads, plugs and connection points before each use, to immediately remove any damaged equipment from service and tag it as out-of-action, and to ensure staff at all levels are trained to identify common signs of wear and know the correct reporting pathway rather than continuing to use compromised equipment because a ward is short-staffed or under pressure. WorkSafe is also pointing providers back to their existing electrical testing and tagging regimes under AS/NZS 3760, and recommending these be extended explicitly to cover mobile care equipment, which is moved and handled far more frequently than fixed electrical installations and therefore wears differently.

The alert lands at a time when healthcare and aged care WHS practices are already under sustained regulatory and public scrutiny, and it’s a useful reminder that some of the highest-frequency risks in clinical environments are also the least dramatic: not a single catastrophic failure, but the slow, cumulative wear on everyday mobile equipment that goes unnoticed if inspection regimes lapse. Facilities managers and clinical safety leads should treat this as a prompt to confirm their equipment inspection registers actually cover mobile plant, not just fixed wiring and appliances.