ANNUAL REPORT 2023/24 Introduction

Towards 1 million practitioners

The National Scheme has a core focus on ensuring a safe, high-quality health workforce that can be accessed throughout Australia. At 30 June, Australia had 920,535 registered health practitioners, an increase of nearly 5% since last year.

We have been working hard to get new international practitioners registered faster and safely by implementing changes in response to the Kruk review. These included making identity checks easier, opening a second assessment centre for nurses and midwives, reviewing English-language requirements, and developing fast-track registration pathways for specialist medical graduates and other priority professions.

The growth in internationally qualified health practitioners is strong, with 48.4% more new overseas practitioners gaining registration than last year. Improvements to our registration processes reduced the time it took to assess a complete international application from an average of 60 days to 33 days.

The number of health practitioners per capita continues to grow steadily and there are now 3.4 registered health practitioners for every 100 Australians. This is positive news, although a challenge remains in the geographic distribution of skill and specialisation of practitioners around the country so the community is able to access healthcare when they need it.

Leadership and collaboration

Two landmark rulings were made under the National Law this year. In September, the first custodial sentence was imposed on someone falsely claiming to be a registered health practitioner. And in October, a tribunal ruled against a doctor over his discriminatory, culturally unsafe, insulting and offensive behaviour towards a Yuggera, Warangoo and Wiradjuri man. The doctor was reprimanded and disqualified for 12 months. This outcome reflects changes made in 2022 to strengthen the National Law to eliminate racism from Australian healthcare.

We remain vigilant about new models of care, which bring both benefits and potential risks for patient safety. Issues such as medicinal cannabis and vaping cut across regulatory areas and we have been working with the Therapeutic Goods Administration to develop cross-regulatory solutions. Emerging services that are driven in part by social media trends, such as cosmetic procedures and weight-loss drugs, often fall outside of traditional healthcare models, and when people are harmed it is not always reported to us. In response, we have bolstered our work to draw on multiple sources of regulatory data to gain earlier insights on emerging issues that may require a strengthened regulatory response.

Working with other agencies helps us to act faster to prevent future harm. We convened a number of fora and symposia during the year to explore how to improve data and information sharing among regulatory agencies, and to bring together agencies and services to address other pressing issues such as racism in healthcare, practitioner distress during the notifications process, and family and domestic violence.

Improvements and initiatives

The final group of changes in the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2022 were made this year. And in September, the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (Surgeons) Amendment Act 2023 enacted protection of the title ‘surgeon’ when used by medical practitioners.

Helping consumers to get to the right place when they have a concern about their healthcare has been the focus of a joint initiative with the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. Working closely with consumers, we published a suite of resources for health practitioners and consumers to improve the consumer experience of making a complaint.

We were pleased to see increased traffic to our website after launching a new design. The updated pages include improved information for consumers and practitioners, including how to find the right place to report a concern. It is now easier to search the Register of practitioners and there was a 36.0% increase in register use compared with last year.

Farewelling our CEO

After 15 years, Ahpra CEO Martin Fletcher announced his intention to step down in December 2024. Martin was appointed as the inaugural CEO of Ahpra in 2009. He has worked tirelessly to establish and lead an internationally respected regulatory scheme for health practitioners. He will leave Ahpra well placed to face the challenges of the future in protecting the public and enabling access to a highly skilled and safe health workforce in Australia.

In closing, we thank Ahpra staff and National Board and committee members for their commitment, efforts and achievements throughout an exceptionally busy year. And we thank the registered health practitioners around Australia for their continued dedication to safe, high-quality healthcare.