Advertising Concerns: How Ahpra Assesses Health Advertising and What to Do Next

Health advertising in Australia is held to a stricter standard than ordinary marketing. Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law makes it an offence to advertise a regulated health service, or a business that provides one, in a way that breaches its prohibitions. The Ahpra and National Board Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service explain how those prohibitions are applied in practice.

Advertising is much broader than paid ads. Any public communication that promotes a regulated health service and seeks to attract people to it can count, whatever the format: your website, a clinic Instagram account, a booking-platform profile, a directory listing, a newsletter, signage, a video, or a post on a personal account that ends with a booking link. Anyone who publishes, authorises, directs or can remove the content may be treated as the advertiser, including practice companies, managers and unregistered owners.

An advertising concern usually reaches you in one of two ways:

• An advertising compliance letter. Ahpra identifies specific material, explains why it appears not to comply and gives you a deadline to correct it. This is the most common form of contact.
• A notification about your conduct. Where advertising is serious, repeated or tied to other concerns, it may be handled as a conduct matter under your Board's code, alongside or instead of the offence provisions.

Advertising problems also turn up in other concerns. A cosmetic clinic notification often includes advertising issues, and inaccurate titles can raise questions of honesty. If your concern involves cosmetic procedures, read our page on cosmetic practice concerns as well.

Ahpra manages advertising complaints under a published, risk-based advertising compliance and enforcement strategy. The starting assumption is that most advertisers want to comply, so education and correction are the primary tools for low-risk matters, while serious or repeated breaches attract stronger responses.

The strategy identifies priority areas that are more likely to be escalated:

• advertising that causes, or risks, actual harm to patients
• misleading claims about treating serious illness
• advertising that targets or reaches vulnerable people, such as people with body image concerns, serious illness, disability, financial stress or limited health literacy
• widespread non-compliant practices within a profession
• holding out as registered, or misusing protected or specialist titles

For testimonials, enforcement focuses on those that also breach another part of section 133, for example by being misleading. Ahpra also runs proactive audits, including checks on the declaration you make at registration renewal that your advertising complies.

Penalties are significant. Amendments to the National Law passed in 2022 raised the maximum penalty for an advertising offence to 60,000 dollars per offence for an individual and 120,000 dollars per offence for a body corporate. Separately from any prosecution, a registered practitioner can face disciplinary action, including findings of unprofessional conduct or professional misconduct. Where advertising is part of a wider conduct concern, the matter follows the usual notification process described on our Ahpra notification help page; in New South Wales and Queensland the co-regulatory bodies may be involved.

Most practitioners who respond promptly, take the concern seriously and correct their advertising across all channels see the matter closed. Those who ignore deadlines, argue that the rules do not apply to them or make only partial changes risk escalation to a warning, conditions on their registration or prosecution. Every matter is decided on its own facts, and no course can guarantee any regulatory outcome.

Education can help in three honest ways. First, it helps you understand the rules well enough to audit your own material accurately, which is what actually closes most matters. Second, if your concern has become a conduct matter, structured learning that is relevant to the specific problem, together with a clear account of what you learnt and changed, is the kind of material a Board can weigh. Third, it gives your team a shared standard so the same problem does not recur through a new staff member or agency.

What education cannot do is substitute for fixing the advertising. A certificate sitting beside a non-compliant website does not help. If you are subject to a condition or undertaking, check with Ahpra or your Board whether a particular course is acceptable before relying on it.

Writing up what you changed

If you are asked to reflect, or you want to record your learning against your CPD plan, a short reflective account works best when it names the problem, explains why it breached the rules, describes the specific changes and states how you will keep checking. Our reflective statement template gives you a structure. Record the actual time you spent learning against your own CPD plan.

The review widget on the home page

A psychology practice embeds its live Google reviews on its website, including comments from clients about recovering from depression. Once the practice displays them on its own site, they become the practice's testimonials. The fix is to remove the widget, keep any non-clinical comments only if they are genuinely about things like parking or reception, and leave third-party platforms alone rather than engaging with clinical reviews there.

The condition list

A clinic's website lists infant colic, asthma and ear infections among conditions it treats. A letter cites two web pages. The practitioner removes those pages but leaves the same list on a social media post and a directory profile. Ahpra may treat that as continued non-compliance. The better response is a full audit and a reply that describes it.

The free first visit

A practice promotes a free assessment and recovers the cost through higher follow-up fees. The offer has no stated terms and the total cost is unclear. Rewriting the offer with eligibility, expiry and total cost, or dropping it, addresses both the inducement and the misleading-price problems.