The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, Ahpra, and the 15 National Boards it supports register almost a million health practitioners and deal with concerns raised about them everywhere except NSW. In Queensland they deal only with matters the state's Health Ombudsman passes on. The law that created the scheme says protecting the public is "paramount".
On registration, the published record is good. Ahpra registered 959,838 practitioners at 30 June 2025, and graduates were registered on average six days after Ahpra received evidence of graduation (Annual Report 2024/25).
On complaints, which Ahpra calls notifications, the record is poor.
More open cases, older cases, fewer outcomes
In 2024/25 Ahpra received 13,327 notifications, 19% more than the year before. It closed 8.3% more. The gap went into the backlog. Ahpra's own Regulatory Performance Committee reported that open notifications at 30 June 2025 "grew by 26.7%, adding 1,186 matters", and that notifications older than 12 months "rose by 30.7%".
Of the notifications Ahpra closed that year, 91.5% ended with "no further regulatory action". That figure needs care: it includes matters referred to other bodies and matters where the practitioner had already fixed the problem, and many concerns are not ones a regulator can or should act on. The more telling number is the count of notifications that did end in regulatory action, such as conditions, a caution or loss of registration. On Regulator Review's calculation from Ahpra's tables, it fell from 1,437 in 2023/24 to 1,033 in 2024/25, a drop of about 28% in a year when closures rose. Ahpra's annual report does not explain the fall. It coincided with a new case management system, a larger share of notifications sent down a fast "early determination" track, and more referrals to other bodies.
Faster on average, slower on serious matters
Ahpra says the average time to close a notification is now "the lowest recorded since the start of the scheme", and that 81.1% were closed within six months. Both may be true. Its committee said the improvement was "driven largely by faster completion times for low risk matters". The annual report does not give the average itself, or the peak it says the average has fallen 37% from.
The serious matters tell a different story. Evidence given to the independent review of the scheme led by Sue Dawson showed the average time to complete an investigation rose 52% in the years to 2022/23, including a one-year jump from 367 to 436 days, and that a quarter of investigations had been open for more than two years. Ahpra's annual reports have not given an average investigation time since 2017/18. Its last quarterly report for Victoria, for late 2024, gave an average of 553 days.
The review concluded that "for consumers and practitioners alike Ahpra processes lack timeliness, transparency and natural justice". In May 2026 Health Ministers accepted that the Ahpra Board must "immediately improve timeliness" and commission an independent review of Ahpra's organisational capability.
None of this is new. In its 2013/14 annual report Ahpra wrote that "we have an issue with the time investigations take". In 2017 a Senate committee called multi-year investigations "simply unacceptable" and found Ahpra "has failed to address these concerns". A second Senate committee asked in 2022 for an analysis of the cause of "protracted notifications timeframes".
Sexual misconduct
In December 2025 the ABC reported two Queensland complaints about intimate examinations in which Ahpra took no further action. Notifications about boundary violations, including sexual boundary violations, reached 1,991 in 2024/25, more than four times the 464 reported in 2019/20, although the category has been widened since. Ahpra published what happened to these notifications from 2019/20 to 2021/22. It has not published outcomes for them since.
There has been real reform. Ahpra ended the use of chaperone conditions as an interim safeguard after a 2017 review, and since April 2026 findings of sexual misconduct must stay on the public register permanently. That change was made by Parliament; Ahpra applied it to 107 practitioners in its first round.
What the public can no longer see
Ahpra publishes a large annual data set. But measures keep disappearing. It introduced a full set of timeliness targets in 2013/14 and reported results against the full set once. Its annual report dropped the average time to complete a notification and the average age of open matters after 2020/21, and it published notifier satisfaction results in full for one year only, 2023/24, when 36% of notifiers were satisfied. Some dropped measures survived in its quarterly performance reports, published since 2016. Those stopped after December 2024. At 11 October 2026 none had been published for 2025 or 2026.
When it released its 2024/25 annual report, Ahpra's media release highlighted the lowest-ever average closure time. It did not mention the rise in open or aged matters.
The grade
Regulator Review's proposed grade is D. Registration works, and when Ahpra takes a practitioner to a tribunal it almost always succeeds. But the job closest to the law's paramount purpose, dealing with concerns about practitioners, has been found too slow by Parliament, independent reviewers and Ministers for at least nine years, and the measures that would show whether it is improving are the ones Ahpra has stopped publishing.
The full report, with sources, sets out the evidence and what would change the grade.