SA Annual Report Summary 2015/16

Foreword from the AHPRA Chair and CEO

The regulation of almost 660,000 registered health practitioners across 14 health professions and a federation of eight states and territories is a large and important task.

AHPRA and the National Boards rely on the local knowledge and expertise of boards, committees and our offices in each state and territory to protect the public Australia-wide. Our number one priority is patient safety while enabling a competent and flexible health workforce to meet the current and future health needs of the community.

South Australia (SA) has 53,119 registered health practitioners. This represents 8.1% of all Australian practitioners, with growth of 1.8% from last year.

The end of grandparenting provisions for the Chinese medicine profession on 30 June 2015 had a significant impact on the workload of the SA office during 2015/16. The office is responsible for managing all registration applications AHPRA receives from existing Chinese medicine practitioners under the grandparenting provisions of the National Law (Section 303), and from internationally qualified applicants.

The office handled approximately 20 times the usual volume of applications towards the close of the grandparenting provisions. These came from 580 individuals and involved approximately 1,100 separate applications under the three areas of practice requiring registration in this profession: acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine and Chinese herbal dispensing. The SA office increased the capacity of our small registration team and introduced a number of procedural improvements to manage the influx.

In 2015/16, the SA office notifications and board services teams streamlined processes for the Immediate Action Committee, holding weekly meetings, which enabled them to act quickly on new notifications that posed significant risk to public safety.

Stakeholder engagement was another strong area of activity for the SA office, with regular meetings with health sector representatives and a number of education and training sessions on behalf of National Boards.

In partnership with the local state boards and committees, the SA office ensures timely and effective regulatory decision-making. This is consistent with our shared regulatory principles and our commitment to being a risk-based regulator.

We thank the staff of the AHPRA SA office, boards and committee members for their hard work and commitment over the past year. While much has been achieved, there is always more to do. We look forward to continuing to work with them to serve the SA community.