Liv's story

Liv made a complaint to our office about Ahpra’s process for reminding practitioners about registration renewal. Liv said that she hadn’t received a reminder or warning before Ahpra advised that her registration had lapsed and that she had been removed from the health practitioner register. Liv explained that her registration had been suspended at the time her registration needed to be renewed. Liv confirmed that she had since been able to renew her registration online but was concerned because it was the second time the issue had occurred for her.

With Liv’s consent, we transferred her concerns to Ahpra via our early resolution transfer process.

What we found

In response to the complaint, Ahpra apologised that the cause of the issue had not been addressed after the first time. Ahpra assured Liv it had undertaken process improvements, including producing registration renewal reminder notices. Ahpra also proactively organised a refund of Liv’s late payment fee.

However, we found that there was a discrepancy in Ahpra's complaint response and previous advice Ahpra had provided to Liv about the late period provided for renewal registration applications. Our office therefore made preliminary inquiries into the matter. We found that a previous email Ahpra sent to Liv contained incorrect information and had not been attached to her registration file for future reference and record-keeping purposes.

Complaint outcome

Ahpra offered a further apology to Liv for her poor experience with Ahpra. It acknowledged that Liv had been provided with incorrect advice that the late period for registration renewal was two months. Ahpra advised that it had provided the relevant staff member and their manager with feedback about this issue to ensure correct communication in the future. Our office closed Liv’s complaint on the basis that Ahpra had taken reasonable steps to address the identified issues, including proactively refunding the late fee she had been charged.