More than just the law

If you ask most frontline alcohol service employees (and indeed, the managers of those employees and license holders of the premises they work in) the reason that they got their RSA online, most will tell you that they got it because the law required it. However, there are much bigger concepts underpinning that law that requires you to complete an RSA course, online or otherwise. The main legal, and indeed social, concept is that of duty of care. Today we explain the idea of having a duty of care, and why both the licensed premises and the employees of that premises have one to the customers.

What Is a Duty of Care?

The most basic definition of a duty of care is:

A legal obligation imposed on an individual to adhere to a reasonable standard of care, while performing acts that have the potential to harm others.

Your RSA course online will introduce you to the concept of duty of care, and we'll go into a little more detail here.

When Do People Have a Duty of Care?

There are many instances when it is accepted that people have a duty of care towards others. Living in Australia, you probably take it for granted that a school that you pay to attend will take reasonable steps to keep you safe, that your employer will do the same, and that any business which you enter has also taken steps to ensure your safety. By the same token, we wouldn’t expect to have a duty of care to a burglar that illegally entered our home (although, it is certainly not legal to take the law into your own hands and harm them).

In terms of RSA courses online, you'll learn that businesses serving liquor have a duty of care to their patrons which usually involves taking steps to ensure the liquor they serve doesn't harm a person.

In new and untested cases, though, judges use several criteria to decide whether one person has a duty of care to another person. These include:

• What is the nature of the relationship between the people? If one party has more power over the environment than another they may have a duty of care

• Is harm reasonably foreseeable? In your RSA course online, you'll learn that harm from excessive alcohol consumption is certainly foreseeable!

• Is there are clear causal relationship between one person's action and another's injury? Your RSA course online will show you that if you served somebody alcohol, then drunkenness caused them harm, you may have breached a duty of care.

The Difficulties of Duty of Care

In going through your RSA course online, you'll also no doubt start to realise that the situation is a little more complex than the 'duty of care' concept makes it seem! For example, consider that it is part of your duty of care not to serve liquor to intoxicated people. However:

• There is nothing to stop people buying more than one drink at once

• There is nothing to stop non-intoxicated friends buying drinks for other friends

• In a busy, dark bar, it can be difficult to see whether a person is becoming intoxicated

• Customer service staff have a natural tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt when they are ordering drinks

Your RSA course online will be much more valuable if you realise that at its heart is a principle that we all value and take for granted - the idea that we have a responsibility to look after each other as much as possible.