Liam’s story

Liam, a health practitioner, made a complaint to our office about Ahpra’s handling of his application for registration and his subsequent application to remove conditions from his registration. Liam complained about Ahpra’s communication throughout these processes, including that Ahpra had not appropriately informed him about temporary changes to registration requirements due to the pandemic.

We began an investigation to consider whether there had been delays in the handling of the matters, whether Ahpra’s communication was fair and reasonable, and also whether the handling of the application to remove conditions from Liam’s registration was fair and reasonable.

What we found

Our investigation found the following:

• There was a significant delay in Ahpra’s handling of Liam’s application for registration, which took more than 10 months to be assessed between February and November 2019. This included:
  • a delay of nearly five months for the application to be assigned to an Ahpra regulatory officer
  • a further three-month delay before the application was considered by the Board. This is a significant departure from the usual timeframe for assessing applications for registration, which is six to eight weeks.
• The delays contributed to Ahpra’s poor communication with Liam, which included Ahpra not responding to correspondence.
• Ahpra had responded to a complaint from Liam, offered an apology for the delay in handling his matter and explained that the delay was caused by:
  • an unexpected increase in applications received
  • efficiency issues as Ahpra transitioned to a new national assessment model.
• Ahpra had adequately communicated the relevant temporary policy position to Liam.
• Ahpra and the Board’s handling of Liam’s application to remove the conditions from his registration was fair and reasonable.

Complaint outcome

We were pleased that Ahpra offered an apology to Liam for the delay in handling his application for registration.

While we acknowledged that Ahpra had communicated the details of the relevant temporary policy position, we advised Ahpra that it would have been better if Liam had also been directly advised when the temporary policy expired.

We continue to closely monitor the timeliness of Ahpra’s handling of registration matters.