Alberta first aid requirements: what your work site actually needs

First aid is the requirement companies most often get almost right — a kit on the wall, someone with a ticket somewhere on site. Alberta’s OHS Code is more specific than that, and the specifics are exactly what an officer checks after an injury.

The three factors that set your requirements

Schedule 2 of the OHS Code works as a lookup: your obligations depend on —

1. Workers per shift at the site — banded (roughly: 1, 2–4, 5–9, 10–19, 20–49, 50–99, 100–199, 200+). Count the shift, not the payroll.
2. Hazard level — low hazard (offices, most retail) versus high hazard (construction, transport, industrial shops, oilfield). Most industrial SMBs are high hazard.
3. Distance to a health care facility — close (≤20 minutes), distant (20–40 minutes) or isolated (>40 minutes) under normal travel conditions. A lease road in winter is not summer highway time — assess honestly.

Move along any of those axes and your requirements change: more or higher-certified first aiders, bigger kits, and for distant/isolated high hazard sites, an emergency transportation plan for getting an injured worker to care.

What the Code requires beyond the kit

Part 11 (ss. 177–184) covers more than supplies:

• Trained first aiders on shift — the tables specify how many, at which certification level (Emergency/Standard First Aid, and higher requirements as crews grow). A certificate that expired last spring counts as zero.
• First aid records — every injury or illness reported at the site must be recorded (what happened, treatment given, by whom) and records retained. These records are also your early-warning data: recurring minor injuries are how serious ones announce themselves.
• Posted information — workers need to know who the first aiders are and where equipment is.
• First aid room — required at the largest site sizes.

The failure modes we see in the field

• Counting the company, not the shift. Twelve employees total, but the Saturday crew is three people and none of them holds a ticket.
• Mobile and remote work. A service truck 45 minutes up a forestry road is an isolated work site — the requirements travel with the crew, not with the shop address.
• Expiry drift. First aid certificates last three years; crews turn over faster. Without expiry tracking, coverage decays silently until an incident makes it visible.
• Records that live nowhere. Treatments happen, nothing is written down — then a WCB claim or an officer asks for the first aid record and there isn’t one.

Making it stay compliant

The requirement is per-site and per-shift, so compliance is a scheduling problem as much as a purchasing problem: enough current tickets, on the right shifts, at every site, with records accumulating. That’s a tracking-and-expiry system — precisely the kind of thing that decays in a spreadsheet and holds in software that chases expiries and logs treatments for you.

Exact kit contents, first aider counts and certification levels for your site size and hazard class come from Schedule 2’s tables — check the current consolidation of the Code (AR 191/2021) for your row, or let Vigil Advisor determine it from your site profile.