Doctors not the only ones angry at AHPRA

The regulator of my regulator is my friend? Think again.

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Once again, roughly two thirds of complaints to the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman last financial year were related to AHPRA and the national boards’ processes for receiving and managing notifications.

But the overwhelming sentiment wasn’t that AHPRA was too harsh or punitive; a high volume of complaints were from notifiers who were concerned that the regulator had not taken enough action.

According to the NHPO annual report, the top five issues raised in the 435 notifications related to AHPRA were:

• Notifiers concerned about the fairness of the Board’s decision to take no further action at the assessment stage;
• Notifiers concerned that information was not appropriately considered when the Board decided to take no further action at the assessment stage;
• Notifiers concerned that the Board had not explained its reasons for taking no further action at the assessment stage;
• Practitioners concerned that there were delays in notification management; and
• Notifiers concerned that inadequate steps had been taken when a Board decided to take no further action at the assessment stage.

There was, however, a significant rise in complaints from people concerned that AHPRA had not picked up on the vexatious nature of a notification; from 14 complaints in 2022 to 44 complaints in 2023 to 73 complaints in 2024.

It was a timely year, then, for the NHPO to finalise its independent review of the implementation of AHPRA’s framework for identifying and dealing with vexatious complaints.

The review looked at the 2018 research which informed the development of the 2020 framework, academic research on vexatious notifications and AHPRA’s internal documents related to the framework.

It has been running since 2022 and was set to report by the end of the 2023 calendar year.

The NHPO annual report noted that it would likely be published in the 2024-25 financial year.

There was also an uptick in complaints related to health practitioners who had their registration suspended or restricted while an investigation was ongoing, a practice that it calls “immediate action”.

“We have seen AHPRA’s recent commitment to improving health practitioners’ experiences throughout the notifications process, particularly where a notification relates to a practitioner’s health,” the NHPO wrote.

“However, we continue to be concerned about the timeliness of immediate action-related processes and investigations into health practitioners subject to immediate action.

“For example, we have seen investigations taking longer than 2 years to complete while a health practitioner remains subject to immediate action.”

The NHPO investigation commenced in mid-2024 and will consider how and when AHPRA uses immediate action.

Most of the complaints to the Ombudsman were finalised without the need for a formal investigation; just 12 of 660 resolved complaints required a full investigation.

The NHPO also ran the independent review into podiatric surgeon regulation.