Figures released under Freedom of Information laws reveal the extent of wait times for health practitioners.
While AHPRA closed 50% of notifications within three months of receipt last financial year, hundreds of health practitioners were left waiting more than a year for a resolution.
New data released under Freedom of Information laws this week breaks down, in three-month increments, the time to resolution for all notifications resolved between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025.
Normally, data on AHPRA’s total number of notifications received and closed would not be available until it issued its annual report for the year. Even then, the data tends not to be broken down by time-to-resolution.
Of the 12,157 notifications closed in the 2024 financial year, half had been open for less than three months and roughly one in three had been open between three and six months.
One in 10 notifications were open for between six and nine months.
In all, 94.7% of the notifications closed in the 2024 financial year had been open for less than 12 months.
That left 1.6% which were open for between 12 and 15 months, 0.7% open for 15 to 18 months, 0.3% open for 18 to 21 months and 0.4% open for 21 to 24 months.
Around 2.4%, or 294 notifications, were closed after being open for longer than 24 months.
Some of these practitioners may have been subject to immediate action, in which case they may have had their registration suspended or been placed under certain conditions while investigations were ongoing.
While the FOI document did not break down the data by registered profession, past annual reports have shown that the bulk of notifications received relate to medical practitioners.
In 2024, 57% of notifications received were about a medical practitioner.
Nurses were the next-largest group, but still only accounted for about 17% of total notifications.
AHPRA has come under considerable fire over the last 12 months for the length of time it takes to close notifications.
Related
In September, a review of AHPRA’s complexity cited “deteriorating timeliness” as evidence that the regulator did not have the capacity to deliver the number of investigations with which it was currently tasked.
“The reasons for prolonged investigation timeframes are not apparent or not convincing,” the final report from the Independent Review of Complexity in the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme for health practitioners said.
“Procedural fairness and humanity is at the heart of this matter, in the context of the significant personal and economic impact on practitioners.”
It ultimately recommended creating a unified national approach to health complaints, which would require immediate focus on improved management of high-risk matters within the National Scheme, to ensure best practice complaints handling.
This would include an audit of all investigations which have been open for more than 12 months and updated processes for suspected vexatious complaints.
The review also recommended that health ministers task the policy and legislation committee to establish a statutory right of review of notification decisions and to amend legislation to “put beyond doubt that a practitioner may appeal a Board decision not to revoke an earlier imposed suspension”.
