Despite a new CEO vowing to make AHPRA a kinder regulator, practitioner complaints about the scheme have risen by more than 40%.
This past financial year, the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman fielded more complaints about AHPRA than ever before – but it was issues with the regulator’s new registration system, not notifications, pushing the increase.
The NHPO, which is led by National Health Practitioner Ombudsman and National Health Practitioner Privacy Commissioner Richelle McCausland, is one of the main bodies responsible for handling complaints about decisions made by AHPRA, the national boards, accreditation authorities and specialist medical colleges.
In the 2023-24 financial year (i.e. two financial years ago) it received 691 complaints, 435 of which were related to concerns about how AHPRA had handled a notification made against a practitioner.
Last financial year, though, the total number of complaints received reached 980, or an increase of 42%.
However, the number of complaints specifically about AHPRA’s handling of a notification only rose to 508, an increase of just 17%.
If the proportion of complaints about AHPRA’s handling of notifications had grown at the same rate as complaints in general, this number would have been 618; ergo, something else was going that was causing complaints.
According to the NHPO annual report for the 2024-25 financial year, the driving factor was registration matters; the office went from having received 123 complaints about registration matters in 2023-24 to receiving 355 in 2024-25.
It appears that the inciting incident was a March 2025 update to AHPRA’s operating system and practitioner portal.
This gave just two months’ leeway before Australia’s largest group of registered health professionals – nurses and midwives, of which there are 500,000 – had to log in and renew their registration.
“Between March and June 2025, we recorded 112 complaints about AHPRA’s new operating system,” the annual report read.
“May 2025 was one of our busiest months in 2024–25 as we managed the increase in complaints alongside the usual demand for our services (141 complaints received compared with 56 complaints in May 2024).
“The 112 complaints our office received about AHPRA’s new system came from 104 people, most of whom identified themselves as nurses (76 complaints).”
Crucially, the new portal design included a multifactor authentication process.
One of the most common themes among the practitioners who complained to the NHPO was technical problems, such as being unable to reset passwords or receive verification emails.
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There were also some practitioners who did not have access to a smartphone, which the portal required for multifactor authentication, or who did not have access to a computer or the internet. Others raised privacy concerns around sharing their details with a third-party authentication app.
Other complaints related to registration came from medical practitioners who felt that their registration fees were too high, having risen from $860 in 2023 to $995 in 2024 to $1027 in 2025.
The ombudsman office ultimately concluded that it was satisfied that the increases in registration fees was lower than CPI when taking into account a new cost allocation model that the regulator had introduced, but that AHPRA should be more transparent about its fee model.
The NHPO also recorded 292 instances where practitioners complained about AHPRA’s customer service (or perceived lack thereof) in relation to the new portal.
Of the complaints that did relate to the way AHPRA handled a notification, the most common concerns came from notifiers themselves.
Often, the NHPO said, notifiers complained that AHPRA’s decision to take no further action on a notification at the assessment stage was unreasonable or not adequately explained, or that the regulator had not taken all the information into consideration.
“When we assessed the complaints we received about this issue, we were satisfied in most instances that it was open to AHPRA to determine that the concerns raised did not meet the grounds for a notification,” the NHPO said.
“We also generally found that AHPRA had explained the reasons for its decisions with appropriate reference to the correct section of the National Law.”
Meanwhile, practitioners who were the subject of a notification tended to raise concerns over how long AHPRA took to make decisions, or felt that a decision to take immediate action was unreasonable.
On this last point, the NHPO launched an own-motion investigation in July 2024 into how AHPRA handles matters involving immediate action and whether there are enough safeguards in place to protect practitioners who have been suspended or had conditions placed on their registration while an investigation is ongoing.
It is yet to release a final report.
