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Service and sales workers · code 5321

Health care assistants

Software can log the observations. Noticing that a patient isn't themselves is still human.

AI barely touches any of the six tasks, from watching over and caring for patients to keeping rooms clean and lifting and moving people.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Health care assistants provide direct personal care and assistance with activities of daily living to patients and residents in a variety of health care settings such as hospitals, clinics and residential nursing care facilities. They generally work in implementation of established care plans and practices, and under the direct supervision of medical, nursing or other health professionals or associate professionals. Tasks include - (a) providing care, support and treatment to patients and residents of medical, rehabilitative and residential care facilities according to treatment plans established by medical, nursing and other health professionals; (b) assisting patients with personal and therapeutic care needs such as personal hygiene, feeding, dressing, physical mobility and exercise, communication, taking oral medications and changing dressings; (c) positioning, lifting and turning patients and transporting them in wheelchairs or on movable beds; (d) maintaining patients’ environmental hygiene standards, such as cleaning patient rooms and changing bed linen; (e) providing massage and other non-pharmacological pain relief measures, such as during pregnancy and labour; (f) observing patients’ condition, responses and behaviour and reporting changes to a health professional. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Birth assistant (clinic or hospital) - Nursing aide (clinic or hospital) - Patient care assistant - Psychiatric aid Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Nurse (professional) - 2221 - Nurse (associate professional) - 3221 - Ambulance worker - 3258 - Nursing aide (home) - 5322 Notes Workers who provide personal care to residents of institutions and facilities that have permanent medical or nursing supervision (such as hospitals, rehabilitation centres, residential nursing care facilities and nursing homes), and therefore work under the direct supervision of nurses, medical doctors, or other health professionals or associate professionals, are classified in Unit Group 5321: Health Care Assistants. Workers who provide personal care to residents of independent living units, generally without permanent medical or nursing supervision, should be classified in Unit Group 5322: Home-based Personal Care Workers. In general, workers classified in Minor Group 532: Personal Care Workers in Health Services do not perform tasks requiring extensive medical knowledge or training, such as administering medications and cleaning and dressing wounds: where tasks of this type are performed they are of a simple and routine nature.

  • healthcare assistant

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

86 / 100

Strongly holds up against AI

Most of this job still needs an actual human. AI would mostly be making the tea.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Not Exposed

62 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 6 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 14.1 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 14.1 = 85.9.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Not Exposed”: None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count.

This job rates 46.1 out of 100 for how hands-on it is. The score above only looks at AI tools, not robots, but for work this far from the physical that matters less.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Health care assistants 86

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Recording observations and care notes.
  • Responding to alerts from bedside monitors.
  • Rotas and task lists.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Personal care with dignity.
  • Lifting and moving patients safely.
  • Comforting people who are frightened or in pain.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Working with remote monitoring and alerts.
  • Lifting and mobility equipment.
  • More care delivered at home.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Low

26 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 60 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Some

46 how hands-on

A fair part of this job is hands-on, so robots would be needed for that part, not just software.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Less than half of this job is hands-on. Robots still matter, but for a smaller part of the work, so we don't sort it any further.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 36 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

46 How
hands-on
36 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Less than half hands-on

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 2 US jobs .

finger skill 37.5 · hand skill 34.8 · cramped spaces 35.4 · averaged · rule: hands-on under 50

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 24, against an average of 14. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 24

    Observing patients’ condition, responses and behaviour and reporting changes to a health professional.

    Very Low
  2. 17

    Providing care, support and treatment to patients and residents of medical, rehabilitative and residential care facilities according to treatment plans established by medical, nursing and other health professionals

    Very Low
  3. 12

    Assisting patients with personal and therapeutic care needs such as personal hygiene, feeding, dressing, physical mobility and exercise, communication, taking oral medications and changing dressings

    Very Low
  4. 12

    Providing massage and other non-pharmacological pain relief measures, such as during pregnancy and labour

    Very Low
  5. 10

    Maintaining patients' environmental hygiene standards, such as cleaning patient rooms and changing bed linen

    Very Low
  6. 10

    Positioning, lifting and turning patients and transporting them in wheelchairs or on movable beds

    Very Low

6 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
60
AI does it for you
26

Sidekick wins, by 34 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches, but only partly: not everyone in it does this job. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 4233

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Out of every 100 conversations

62
38

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job. This job makes up 0.42% of the conversations.

The data is sorted by US job, and this one matches 2 of them. We've combined them, counting each by how often it comes up in the conversations, so the busiest one counts most.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should healthcare assistants be worried?

Short answer: not really. Put the kettle on.

No. Every task rates Very Low; the most exposed is observing patients and reporting changes. Monitoring devices and digital records will help, but personal care, lifting and comfort need a person.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 39 jobs in the “Service and sales workers” family, averaging 74. This one is above the family average.

Pit this against any other job →