Ethics and professionalism CPD for psychologists in Australia

For most of the life of the national scheme, psychologists were held to a code they did not write. When national registration began in 2010 the Psychology Board of Australia adopted the Australian Psychological Society's Code of Ethics (2007) as its regulatory code. That arrangement ended on 1 December 2025, when the Board's first regulatory Code of conduct for psychologists took effect. The Board has said plainly that the APS Code is no longer the standard it uses. The APS Code and its ethical guidelines remain useful professional resources, but a notification about your conduct is now assessed against the Board's code.

This matters more than a change of title. The APS Code was written largely as principles that invited interpretation. The Board's code is written as standards, often in prescriptive terms that require specific behaviour, and it states that breaches may lead to regulatory action. Commentary from co-regulators has noted that some expectations are stricter than habits many practitioners had come to treat as normal. If you trained and practised under the APS Code, it is worth reading the new code line by line rather than assuming it says the same thing in different words.

Psychologists are also one of the few professions that do not use the shared Code of conduct adopted by twelve other National Boards. That makes this page different from most profession pages on our site: the sections you need to know, and some of the rules, are specific to psychology.

According to the Psychology Board's 2024/25 annual summary, there were 50,409 registered psychologists in Australia. Ahpra received 895 notifications about 661 psychologists, and once the New South Wales and Queensland co-regulatory systems are included, 1,549 notifications were made about 1,148 psychologists nationally, about 2.3% of the profession. Almost three-quarters came from patients, relatives or members of the public.

The most common issues raised were:

• Clinical care, 21.7% of issues
• Communication, 16.1%
• Documentation, 14.6%
• Boundary violation, 8.3%

Boundary problems also sit inside the other categories. A clinical care complaint may turn on an unmanaged dual role, a communication complaint may concern contact between sessions, and a documentation complaint may arise because you cannot show how a boundary decision was made. Of 111 mandatory notifications about psychologists that year, 11 concerned sexual misconduct and 26 concerned impairment.

Most notifications close without further regulatory action: about 69% of closed notifications about psychologists in 2024/25. Where you practise affects the pathway. In New South Wales, complaints are managed by the Health Care Complaints Commission with the Psychology Council of New South Wales. In Queensland, the Office of the Health Ombudsman receives complaints first. Elsewhere, Ahpra and the Board manage them directly.

Most of our topic courses are written for all registered health practitioners, and several refer to the shared Code of conduct used by twelve other National Boards. The underlying principles on records, privacy, telehealth, social media and ethical reasoning carry across, but the precise wording you are held to is in the Psychology Board's own code. When a shared course cites a section of the shared code, take a moment to find the equivalent standard in the Board's code and note it in your CPD record. That small step is itself good evidence of reflective, profession-specific learning.

Our psychology course, Professional Boundaries and Multiple Relationships for Psychologists, is written directly against the Board's code and FAQ. It includes an eight-step framework for multiple relationship decisions, a documentation checklist, scripts for declining and referring, and a quick-reference table of default responses. Supervisors of provisional psychologists and registrars can use the scenarios for supervision discussions, and psychologists who trained under the APS Code will find it a practical way to update their habits.

The code's default against multiple relationships is hardest to apply where you are the only psychologist for hours, or where you share a cultural, faith, professional or identity-based community with your clients. In those settings overlaps cannot always be avoided, and the code does not pretend otherwise. What it expects is that you can show a reasonable belief that continuing was necessary, that you discussed the overlap openly with the client, agreed how to handle encounters outside sessions, sought peer consultation and recorded a review plan.

Working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients and communities adds further layers, including kinship obligations and community roles that a city-based model of boundaries may not anticipate. Cultural safety is now embedded in the Board's competencies, and our Cultural Safety in Practice course pairs well with boundary learning. Isolation is itself a risk factor, so a reliable remote supervision and peer consultation network is part of managing boundaries, not an optional extra.