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We collaborate across the National Scheme and with other organisations to make sure that our standards, codes and guidelines are supported by strong evidence.
Research, consultation and collaboration help us respond to the rapidly evolving nature of health practice, improve our services, and strengthen the trust and confidence that the public, health practitioners and other stakeholders have in the scheme.
This year, we:
The Professions Reference Group (PRG) met six times. It was chaired by Ms Julianne Bryce from the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation from July to December 2024, and by Dr Zena Burgess from the Australian Psychological Society from February to June 2025.
The PRG brings together professional associations for each of the regulated health professions. It provided feedback on our strategies to proactively respond to emerging public safety concerns, implementation of our new operating system, and our review of parental leave and registration fees.
Ahpra also updated PRG members on our work to identify and minimise distress for practitioners involved in a notifications process, the development of National Law amendments, graduate registration and practitioner renewal campaigns, and our accreditation work.
We continued to strengthen our engagement with communities across Australia. Central to this effort was the Community Advisory Council (CAC), which remained our primary source of consumer and community representation.
CAC members provided advice on how and where consumer voices should be heard, with a particular focus on communities who, for different reasons, have difficulty accessing health services. CAC members participated in recruitment panels for the National Boards; contributed to committees, reference groups and stakeholder events; and supported the development of standards, codes, guidelines and policies.
The CAC presented feedback on a wide range of initiatives, including:
Members also actively contributed to the National Scheme Combined Meeting program, championing the inclusion of public perspectives in health regulation and promoting meaningful engagement by inviting and involving diverse viewpoints.
The CAC met eight times during the year. We thank Ms Patricia Hall for her leadership as Chair, which concluded on 30 June. Meeting communiqués are published on our website.
The National Boards and Ahpra regularly collaborate on shared policy issues that affect the health professions similarly. This supports effective interprofessional care, helps to simplify regulation, and makes it easier for the public, practitioners and employers to know what to expect of registered health practitioners.
Our areas of focus this year included:
As trusted members of their communities, Australia’s registered health practitioners have a unique opportunity to recognise and respond to family, domestic and sexual violence (FDSV). Health practitioners play an important role in the early detection, support, referral and documentation of incidents, and in enabling access to effective healthcare for victim-survivors, people who use violence, and their families and carers.
In August, health ministers requested that we implement a suite of initiatives aimed at building health workforce capability to recognise and respond to FDSV. Our action plan is focused on three streams of work:
We are committed to taking action to help end FDSV in our communities. This work is being undertaken progressively, with an initial focus on work we can achieve within existing regulatory frameworks that will set the foundation for future work. Over the past year, we have:
Throughout the year, the National Boards and Ahpra together provided input to the following external policy consultations and reviews:
Ahpra and the National Boards are implementing the next group of changes to the National Law over the next 12 months. The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill was passed by Queensland Parliament and became law on 9 April. The key changes include:
These changes align with the range of reforms that we are progressing as part of our actions to improve public safety regarding sexual misconduct in healthcare.
It is important that sufficient time is taken to explain these changes to practitioners and the public. They also have an impact on our operations. The changes will start nationally on a date, or dates, to be decided by governments.
Ahpra maintains strong relationships with national, state and territory health departments. A key part of this is the Jurisdictional Advisory Committee, which meets quarterly to advise on routine National Scheme matters requiring decisions by health ministers.
We continued to participate by invitation in Senate budget estimates hearings. This is an important opportunity to inform senators about our work and performance, and to address any questions or concerns.
Over the past 12 months, we have made significant contributions to the Independent review of complexity in the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme, also known as the Dawson review. The final report by independent reviewer Ms Sue Dawson is expected to be delivered to health ministers later in 2025.
Ahpra is a designated World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Health Workforce Regulation. We collaborate to strengthen the regulatory capacity and professional competencies of health workforce regulators across the WHO Western Pacific Region. We lead the Western Pacific Regional Network of Health Workforce Regulators, which includes representatives from more than 20 countries.
Over the past year, we hosted four regional webinars on regulatory challenges and welcomed several international delegations to exchange insights on health practitioner regulation.
We also deepened our global partnerships with leading regulatory bodies, including the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities and the Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation, fostering shared learning and collaboration.
We rely on research, evaluation and data to inform our work in health practitioner regulation. To support the ethical conduct of research, we established relationships with two additional Human Research Ethics Committees. We continued to build our research portfolio through a variety of projects, including those that investigate practitioners’ and the public’s trust and confidence in our work, and identified ways we can improve.
Our research and evaluation projects (with information on Human Research Ethics Committee approvals) included:
We wrote or contributed to four publications in peer-reviewed journals:
The comprehensive national data that Ahpra collects have demographic, commercial and research value and value for workforce planning. Our data access and research policy and the information on our website set out the data already available and how to access them, and the processes for requesting data that are not publicly available. We are not able to meet all requests for information, as both the National Law and the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) impose strict limits on the use of our data.
We also provide a data-matching service to Australian universities wishing to track graduate outcomes. Ahpra can match a graduate’s student number to their registration number so the university does not have to manually search the Register of practitioners. This enables universities to determine whether they are meeting their funding requirements and the intended outcomes of their rural training programs by determining how many of their health students are working in regional and rural locations. Some universities also use the register to assess graduate outcomes more broadly in metropolitan and rural areas. We received and fulfilled nine requests for student data matching in 2024/25.
Each year, Ahpra provides an extract of medical practitioner data from the Register of practitioners to Medical Deans, who combine it with their own data from surveys of final-year medical students. Including Ahpra’s data with their own allows Medical Deans to display information about medical practitioners that is broken down by a range of demographic factors, such as gender, rurality, specialty and graduates’ preferred versus actual work locations.
