Yusef’s story

Yusef raised concerns with us about a delay and poor communication from Ahpra during the notifications process. He said that the Ahpra regulatory advisor assigned to his matter could not take his calls and that his calls were not returned.

While we generally do not become involved in active matters, we made preliminary inquiries to Ahpra to get more information about the stated delay and communication issues. We found the following:

• There had been an unreasonable delay in Ahpra’s management of the notification. However, Ahpra had acknowledged and apologised for this delay, and the notification subsequently appeared to be progressing in line with the standard timelines.
• Yusef had repeatedly tried to contact the Ahpra regulatory advisor and his calls and emails had not been returned within the timeframes outlined by Ahpra’s customer service team. This appeared to be because the regulatory advisor was absent.

We provided feedback to Ahpra that it would be beneficial if its customer service team was able to see whether a staff member was on leave. This would allow more accurate advice to be provided about potential response times.