How do I meet the 215 / 44 care minute targets and prove 24/7 RN coverage every day?

• Registered and enrolled nurses must deliver at least 215 total care minutes per resident per day on average, with at least 44 minutes delivered by a registered nurse (RN). The targets are calibrated to the facility's AN-ACC classification mix — higher-acuity residents drive higher targets.
• A registered nurse must be on-site at a residential aged care facility 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is a hard obligation with narrow exemption circumstances.
• Care minutes must be reported to the Department of Health on a quarterly basis. The report covers the facility's delivered care minutes vs its calibrated targets across the reporting quarter.
• Sustained shortfalls against the target flow into the Staffing domain of the residential star ratings (public-facing) and attract ACQSC assessment attention.
• Care minutes are counted in direct care delivery only — administrative time, breaks, and indirect activities do not count. Providers must distinguish direct from indirect time in their rostering data.

Reference: Aged Care Act 2024 Chapter 3 (Registered Providers — conditions of registration); Aged Care Rules 2025 (care minute and 24/7 RN provisions); Department of Health, Disability and Ageing Care Minutes and 24/7 RN Requirements Guides for Registered Providers of Residential Care Homes (March 2026); Residential Aged Care 24/7 Registered Nurse Supplement guidance.

• Meeting the facility average but falling short on individual residents. The target is an average across the facility calibrated to the class mix — but if a high-acuity resident is chronically under-served while a low-acuity resident is over-served, the facility can still meet the average while failing individual duty of care.
• Not tracking RN vs EN vs PCW time correctly in the roster. If a Personal Care Worker's minutes are counted as RN minutes, the RN shortfall is hidden. Staff category attribution must be correct at the shift level.
• Meeting the RN 44-minute target in hours but failing the 24/7 on-site obligation. A facility with 44 RN minutes per resident per day can still breach 24/7 if the RN rostering creates a gap — a Tuesday 2:00-6:00am with no RN on-site is a breach regardless of the minute total.
• Late quarterly reports because the data needs cleaning. The clean-up itself is a sign the underlying rostering isn't structured for reporting.
• Treating care minutes as a compliance obligation but not an operational metric. The facility that looks at care minutes only at quarter-end is always surprised; the facility that looks at it daily is never surprised.
• Not linking shortfalls to specific days, shifts, and staff categories. When a shortfall is identified, the investigation has to reconstruct which shifts were the problem — which is what the rostering system should have surfaced in real time.

• Daily care minute records per resident, calculated from the roster and the staff-category attribution of each shift. Minutes are split into RN, EN, and PCW categories so the 44-RN target is tracked separately.
• AN-ACC-class-calibrated target per resident per day. When classification changes, the target adjusts automatically.
• 24/7 RN coverage monitor — a continuous check that there is at least one RN on-site at every hour of every day. Gaps are surfaced as hard alerts on the clinical lead and DON dashboards.
• Real-time shortfall alerts — when the day's planned roster falls short of the target, the coordinator sees the shortfall before the shift runs, not after.
• Quarterly report generation pre-populated from the daily records. The report is a view, not a reconstruction.
• Shift-level drill-down from any shortfall — the DON can click from a quarterly shortfall to the specific days, shifts, and staff categories that drove it.
• Star ratings integration — the care minutes performance feeds the Staffing domain of the star rating calculation, so the provider sees their public star rating move as their care minutes performance moves.

When an assessor asks for evidence on this obligation, here's what the platform produces on request — date-stamped, user-attributed, and exportable:

• Daily care minute records per resident — delivered RN, EN, PCW minutes against the calibrated target.
• 24/7 RN coverage log — at every hour of every day, the on-site RN roster position is recorded, with any gaps flagged and investigated.
• Shortfall history with every day a target was missed, the shortfall amount, and the investigation or remediation action taken.
• Staff-category attribution log showing how each shift was categorised for the purpose of care minute counting.
• Quarterly report versions with the submission status and any Department acknowledgement.
• Classification-to-target recalculation log — when a resident's AN-ACC class changed, the new target and the effective date.