AHPRA found that it had ‘typically applied appropriate and proportionate regulatory thresholds’ for notifications about racism and discrimination.
Of the 477 notifications related to racism or discrimination received by AHPRA between July 2023 and February 2026, the regulator says just one was genuinely vexatious and 73 contained “vexatious indicators”.
The data comes from an internal review of how AHPRA handles these notifications, which itself was done at the behest of the Health Ministers Meeting.
In a policy directive issued by state, territory, and federal health ministers in September 2025, AHPRA was tasked with reviewing “notifications and complaints processes on racism and discrimination, including antisemitism”.
The regulator was asked to “identify ways to improve communication of outcomes, data reporting and timeliness of responses” and to publish the review on its website “as soon as practicable”.
“As soon as practicable” was, apparently, Thursday this week.
The findings were largely positive. AHPRA found that “AHPRA and the National Boards have typically applied appropriate and proportionate regulatory thresholds in these matters”.
The regulator estimated that notifications where the primary concern was about a practitioner displaying antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, or non-race-related discrimination represented around 1.5% of all incoming notifications.
Between 1 July 2023 and 28 February 2026, there were 477 of these notifications received.
One in four related to claims of antisemitism and around one in five related to claims of Islamophobia.
There were 36 notifications about racism toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and 93 notifications about racism toward other groups.
The 116 remaining notifications were related to non-racial characteristics including sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion, socioeconomic circumstances, or age.
AHPRA said it had finalised 439 of the 477 matters at the time that the report was compiled.
Related
Of the finalised notifications, 92% were closed with no regulatory action. This is higher than the average rate for all notifications, which currently sits at 88.6%.
While 28 notifications resulted in regulatory action such as a caution or registration conditions being imposed, just five notifications resulted in a referral to tribunal.
Only one notification was found to be vexatious in nature, although “vexatious indicators” were identified in another 73 notifications.
Of the different categories, the highest proportion of vexatious indicators were identified in notifications related to other forms of racism (i.e. not antisemitism or Islamophobia).
Overall, 44% of the discrimination-related notifications related to a practitioner’s conduct on social media. This effect was enhanced for antisemitism and Islamophobia-related notifications; around 85% of these were related to social media.
AHPRA set itself six priority actions, the first of which is to “operationalise” previous recommendations to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural safety.
Other actions include: improving notifier and practitioner correspondence, adopting definitions of racism to support consistent categorisation of racism-related issues, ensuring all staff are trained in identifying vexatious notifications, trialling the use of “proactive regulatory tools”, and strengthening data-sharing arrangements.
Separate to this review, AHPRA has adopted the International Holocaust Rembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
