The Physiotherapy Board of Australia exists to protect the public and to support physiotherapists to provide safe healthcare.

While the Board and Ahpra aim to be fair and compassionate regulators, we recognise that being involved in the regulatory process can be stressful and even distressing.

To help make the process clearer and less stressful for both notifiers and practitioners, Ahpra established an expert advisory group on practitioner distress in 2021.

Including health practitioners, independent regulation experts, National Board members and members of the Ahpra executive, the expert advisory group made 15 recommendations for improvement in 2023.

The inclusion of people with lived experience in the expert advisory group was invaluable.

All its recommendations have been accepted by Ahpra and the National Boards and several are already being implemented.

For example, recommendation 1 was to ‘improve awareness and knowledge among Ahpra staff, Boards and committees about mental health and substance use disorders’.

On the basis of this recommendation, 1400 Ahpra and National Board staff and decision-makers will be offered training in mental health and substance use disorders, allowing them to respond more confidently and compassionately to health-related notifications.

Other actions being implemented will build on work that’s well underway to humanise the experience of practitioners involved in a regulatory process, including the establishment of a health management team in July 2022.

The team has already significantly reduced the time it takes to finalise a notification involving a practitioner with a health impairment.

The changes to health-related notifications align with recent changes that support taking a more risk-based approach to managing notifications.

There is, and always will be, a place for strong, decisive responses to practitioners who engage in professional misconduct or place the public at risk of substantial harm through unsafe practices.

However, for most practitioners, a notification provides an opportunity to reflect, learn and improve.

The Board and Ahpra’s shared goal is to identify and promote these opportunities and to put our regulatory powers to work in ways that better support safe, professional practice.

When the steps taken by a practitioner to strengthen their practice are not sufficient, Ahpra will:

• engage with an employer to identify whether there are ways they can support a practitioner to strengthen their practice to improve safety for future patients
• exercise regulatory powers to require a practitioner to change their practice in a way that will strengthen safety
  or professionalism.

The change in approach has also coincided with improvements in notification response times.

Ahpra closed more notifications than it received in 2023–24 and substantially improved the proportion of notifications closed within six months.

In the 2023–24 financial year, there was:

• an increase in the proportion of notifications that were able to be closed in less than three months
   
• a significant increase in the proportion of notifications that were able to be closed in less than six months
   
• a reduction in the number of practitioners with cases open for over 12 months.

Ahpra is working with practitioners, professional associations, support services and educators to address the stigma and shame associated with receiving a notification.

Notifications are an important way for the public to raise concerns about the healthcare they receive and over the course of your career as a physiotherapist, you may well receive a notification.

Around 0.5 per cent of physiotherapists in Australia received a notification in 2022–23.

Of the 135 notifications closed by Ahpra, nearly 60 per cent required no further regulatory action and only 2.2 per cent resulted in a physiotherapist being disqualified from applying for registration.

If a concern has been raised about you, the best thing you can do—for yourself, for your family and for your patients—is to seek support.

One good place to start is TEN—The Essential Network for Health Professionals (here), which has a range of self- guided resources as well as connections to clinical care.

Visit ahpra.gov.au/Notifications.aspx for more information about the notifications process and physiotherapyboard.gov.au to find out more about the Board and its resources.