Reference
Where First Aid Check’s guidance comes from · Last reviewed 22 July 2026
First Aid Check’s recommendations are built on New Zealand’s health and safety legislation and WorkSafe New Zealand’s good-practice guidance. This page sets out exactly which duties we draw on, so you can see — and verify — the basis for what we recommend.
The Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA) is New Zealand’s core health and safety law. Under section 36, every PCBU (person conducting a business or undertaking) has a primary duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers — which includes providing adequate first aid.
The detail sits in the Health and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016 (the “GRWM Regulations”). The regulations most relevant to first aid are:
A PCBU must ensure that first aid equipment is provided for the workplace, that workers have access to that equipment and to first aid facilities, and that there is access to an adequate number of trained first aiders (or that workers themselves are trained). What is “adequate” is assessed against the nature of the work and its risks.
A PCBU must ensure an emergency plan is prepared, maintained and available for the workplace — covering emergency procedures, including first aid and how workers get help in an emergency.
Where a worker carries out remote or isolated work (work isolated from the assistance of others because of location, time or the nature of the work), the PCBU must manage the risks — including providing a system of work with effective communication and a means of getting help if the worker is injured or becomes ill. This is why First Aid Check recommends extra provisions (such as personal kits, check-in procedures and communications) for remote, mobile and lone workers.
WorkSafe New Zealand — the workplace health and safety regulator — publishes practical guidance on meeting these duties, including its “First aid at work” guidance and quick guide. That guidance describes how to assess first aid needs and scale provision to workplace risk, and is the good-practice benchmark First Aid Check follows.
Alongside the health and safety law above, First Aid Check draws on ACC — New Zealand’s Accident Compensation Corporation. To set each business’s Work levy, ACC assigns every industry a classification unit and a levy rate based on that industry’s actual injury-claims history: higher-risk industries pay more. That makes ACC’s classification an official, data-driven measure of how injury-prone a line of work is.
ACC’s classification is not itself a first aid regulation — your first aid duties come from HSWA 2015 and the GRWM Regulations 2016 above. We use your ACC industry risk band as an independent benchmark that sits beside our own assessment of your specific workplace, so you can see both how your industry rates nationally and what your particular site needs. We refresh our ACC classification table each year against the current ACC Levy Guidebook.