Latest update: 26 August 2026 - 5 min read
Your Staff’s Own Cars Are a WHS Issue — Even for a Two-Minute Drive
In 2024, 188 workers died from work-related traumatic injuries in Australia. Vehicle incidents caused 79 of those deaths — 42% of the total and more than three times the next most common cause, falls from a height, at 13%. That figure covers all industries and vehicle types, not health care specifically.
Why this matters in health and care: when a support worker drives their own car between clients, that vehicle becomes part of your grey fleet as the employer. Your Work Health and Safety (WHS) duty of care can still apply, even though you don’t own, lease, or insure the car. The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 doesn’t exclude short work trips simply because the vehicle is privately owned.
Even a two-minute drive can count. This guide explains what that means for health and care providers, what Safe Work Australia expects, and how to manage WHS risk across your grey fleet.
Safe Work Australia and vehicle risks in health care and social assistance
Safe Work Australia maintains a dedicated vehicle-hazards chapter for the health care and social assistance industry, because so much of the work in this sector depends on getting a worker, and often a client, from one place to another by car. It groups the relevant hazards into four categories.
Patient or client-related risks
Assess anything about the person being transported that changes the risk: medical conditions, mobility, care needs, or a known history of aggression. A care plan that lists required aids, safe handling steps, and any behavioural considerations helps your staff prepare for the specific trip, not just “driving” in general.
Vehicle suitability
The right vehicle for the task matters as much as the driving itself. That covers whether it can safely carry the client given their condition, whether it’s equipped with the right equipment for the client, and whether it suits the trip’s distance and road conditions. Carrying out regular inspection and maintenance matters too — a breakdown mid-route is its own hazard.
Worker suitability
Workers need enough information, training, and instruction to do the transport task safely. You must ensure the worker holds a valid licence for the vehicle, knows what to do in poor conditions, understands relevant policies, and is not expected to drive while fatigued. A worker who’s competent at their clinical or care role isn’t automatically equipped to manage every driving scenario the job puts in front of them.
Emergency-response related risks
Urgent transport puts workers under real pressure: tight time constraints, high-stress situations, and the need to make decisions fast. The same principle holds even outside dedicated emergency response roles — when rushed scheduling leaves no buffer between appointments, it pushes workers toward that same kind of pressure.
What this means for your grey fleet
SafeWork NSW and WorkSafe Queensland both use “grey fleet” specifically in the context of disability, home care, and community care work, and for good reason. In this sector, staff using their own cars isn’t an occasional exception to a company fleet. For many allied health clinics and NDIS providers, it’s the dominant way work-related travel actually happens: a handful of staff cars that nobody has ever formally risk-assessed, shuttling people between appointments all day.
That’s exactly why multiple hazard categories apply here, not just to logistics or trades businesses with liveried vans. A support worker’s own Corolla, used to get between two clients, sits inside the same WHS framework as a fleet vehicle. The ownership is different, the obligation isn’t.
It’s also worth knowing about “double grey fleet,” a variation that shows up often in community care and healthcare settings: a worker driving a client’s car rather than their own. The same WHS principles apply here, too. If a worker is driving as part of their job, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the vehicle’s registration.
Setting up a WHS vehicle policy for your grey fleet
None of this is a call to build a safety department. It’s about setting a handful of specific measures, writing them down, and carrying out checks.
Risk-assess the driving task, not just the vehicle. Look at how staff actually travel between clients: how often, how far, on what kind of roads, and with what time pressure between appointments. Our grey fleet risk assessment guide and checklist walks through this step by step.
Set fitness-to-drive and roadworthiness expectations. Workers should know they’re expected to hold a current licence, keep their vehicle registered and safe to drive, and flag anything that affects their ability to drive safely, including fatigue.
Have a clear incident-escalation path. Staff need to know exactly what to report and to whom, whether that’s a near miss, a mechanical fault, or client-related behaviour that made a trip unsafe.
Download a grey fleet policy template
Most of this belongs in a written policy rather than a set of verbal expectations everyone’s supposed to remember. Our grey fleet policy template includes a safe-driving section built for exactly this: driver eligibility, vehicle suitability, and incident reporting that your team can actually reference.
None of this requires a dedicated WHS role either. In smaller practices and provider organisations, this usually sits with whoever already owns operations or HR. What matters is that someone owns it, checks in on it periodically, and updates it as the team and its travel patterns change.
If you haven’t looked at how your team actually travels between clients, that’s the sensible next step, and the template linked above is a practical place to start.
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