Nicholas is Aviso Specialty’s Head of Risk Intelligence. He has extensive experience in strategic risk consulting, crisis management, business continuity, corporate security, critical infrastructure protection, emergency management, and complex operating environments. Nicholas’s technical knowledge and strategic capability span enterprise risk management, cyber security, resilience, physical security, travel risk, property services, hostile environment advisory, and major event readiness. Nicholas solves complex risk challenges by drawing on senior executive experience across consulting, energy, financial services, telecommunications, government, major events, and defence. He brings a practical understanding of operational risk, stakeholder coordination, security strategy, business continuity, and resilience, adapted to complex regulatory, geographic, and organisational environments.
Beyond Compliance: What Can Aged Care Learn from Mining, Infrastructure and Critical Industries?
As Australia’s aged care sector navigates significant reform, increasing governance expectations and growing operational complexity, boards and executives are focused on delivering safe, sustainable and high-quality care. While regulatory compliance remains essential, compliance alone does not create resilience, improve decision-making or provide confidence that critical risks are being effectively managed.
Some of Australia’s most mature approaches to risk management have emerged from mining, infrastructure, utilities and other critical services, where organisations operate in environments characterised by complex risks, operational interdependencies and potentially severe consequences when controls fail. Over decades, these sectors have developed practical disciplines that move beyond risk registers and reporting towards stronger accountability, resilience and organisational performance.
This presentation will examine four of these disciplines: identifying and monitoring critical controls; improving the quality of risk information provided to boards; embedding learning from incidents and near misses; and strengthening risk culture and accountability.
Although aged care faces a different operating environment, many of the underlying challenges are increasingly similar. Providers are increasingly dependent on workforce availability, technology, third-party suppliers, critical infrastructure and cyber security. Disruption to any of these elements can significantly affect care delivery, organisational performance and stakeholder confidence.
Drawing on practical experience and examples from mining, infrastructure and critical industries, the session will demonstrate how these disciplines can be adapted for aged care. It will explore how boards and executives can gain greater visibility of emerging risks, test whether critical controls are working as intended, improve the quality of information supporting board decisions and turn incidents into meaningful organisational learning.
Rather than treating risk management primarily as a compliance activity, the session will show how leading organisations use risk intelligence to inform strategy, prioritise investment, strengthen governance and improve operational decision-making.
Delegates will leave with a practical framework for assessing risk maturity within their own organisation, including questions boards and executives can use to test governance, reporting, critical controls and organisational resilience.
Learning from industries with long-standing experience managing complex and high-consequence risks offers aged care a fresh perspective on strengthening governance, decision-making and ultimately outcomes for residents, staff and the communities they serve.