Which practitioners does this AHPRA guidance apply to?

The guidance applies to all practitioners registered under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law — including GPs, specialists, nurses and midwives, pharmacists, physiotherapists, psychologists, and dentists. It is not sector-specific. The guidance applies whether the practitioner works in a traditional face-to-face setting, a telehealth model, or an online prescribing platform. The emphasis on telehealth and online prescribing in the accompanying commentary reflects where AHPRA has identified the highest-risk patterns, not a restriction of scope.

What should I do if I think my prescriber has a conflict of interest?

You can ask your prescriber directly whether they receive financial incentives related to the treatment being recommended. Practitioners are now on notice that AHPRA expects disclosure of material conflicts. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can seek a second opinion from a GP without a financial relationship to the recommended treatment. You can also make a complaint to AHPRA through their online complaint portal at ahpra.gov.au — AHPRA CEO Justin Untersteiner specifically asked the public to report concerns about practitioners or organisational arrangements threatening patient safety.

AHPRA puts prescribers on notice: what patients need to know

AHPRA released interim guidance today putting every registered practitioner in Australia on notice: financial and commercial conflicts of interest must be identified, managed, and disclosed to patients. The regulator has been explicit about why: emerging business models with “the potential to unduly influence the advice and treatment provided by practitioners.”

The models they are talking about are not hypothetical. They are operating now, at scale, in the telehealth and online prescribing space.

If you have used an online service to obtain a GLP-1 weight-loss injection, a compounded hormone prescription, a stimulant for adult ADHD, or any number of other medications where the same platform advertised the treatment, the practitioner who prescribed it, and the dispensing service — this guidance is directly relevant to you.

What the guidance actually says

The AHPRA interim guidance identifies three specific patterns as high concern:

Businesses that advertise, prescribe, AND dispense a single medicine — the triple function that removes independent clinical judgement from each step.
Hidden incentives to overservice — practitioners who receive financial benefit from ordering more tests, more treatments, or more referrals.
Incentives to promote specific assessments, treatments or devices — including arrangements where a prescriber’s income depends on recommending a particular product.

The guidance includes case studies — including scenarios specifically designed for GPs working within vertically integrated business models. It is not theoretical.

What is new in this guidance is the explicit confirmation that AHPRA’s prosecutorial reach extends to the organisations and individuals who incite practitioners to act improperly — not just the practitioners themselves. That is a significant expansion of enforcement signal. It means the platform CEO who designs a commission structure incentivising over-prescribing is in scope, not just the GP sitting in front of the patient.

RACGP President Dr Michael Wright was direct in his response: “Our decisions and healthcare need to be based on the best interests of patients, not driven by financial rewards.” He named telehealth providers and online prescribers as businesses that have raised concerns.

Why this matters for patients specifically

The majority of people using online prescribing services are not doing anything wrong. They are navigating access barriers — long GP wait times, cost, geographic isolation, conditions where the stigma of a face-to-face conversation feels prohibitive. The structural factors that make online prescribers appealing are real. Acknowledging that does not require pretending the conflicts are not real too.

Here is what conflict of interest looks like in practice: a telehealth platform charges a subscription fee, prescribes a medication it also sells through an affiliated compounding pharmacy, and pays its prescribers on a per-prescription basis. Every layer of that model creates pressure — structural, not personal — toward recommending treatment. The individual GP in that system may be trying to practise well. The incentive structure does not require them to try not to.

Patients deserve to know when those structures are in place.

This is not an argument against telehealth. General practice has moved substantially into telehealth since the COVID-19 years, and the RACGP has developed telehealth standards that embed the same clinical and ethical obligations as face-to-face care. A telehealth consultation with your regular GP — who has no financial stake in the treatment they recommend — is not what this guidance is targeting. The guidance is targeting the model where the consultation exists as a mechanism for dispensing a product the platform has an interest in selling.

The contested part

There is a version of this critique that will be made — that AHPRA’s guidance will add bureaucratic friction to telehealth services that are meeting unmet need, particularly for populations with access barriers. It is a fair point in partial form.

The answer is not to lower the disclosure standard. It is to design telehealth models that can meet it — where the prescriber’s income is not tied to the specific treatment they recommend, where compounding is not the in-house option, and where patients can access those services through platforms built on clinical independence rather than vertical integration.

The PBS, Medicare, and the registration system that underpins Australian healthcare exist because unregulated markets for healthcare do not produce safe care. Conflicts of interest do not make practitioners bad people. They make the system less trustworthy, and trustworthiness is what the system is built on.

AHPRA’s guidance is interim, which means it is likely to be refined. The principles it articulates are not controversial in clinical ethics. The novelty is applying them explicitly to the telehealth landscape that has grown substantially in the last five years.

What this means this week

If you receive care through an online prescribing service, it is reasonable to ask: does the platform or practitioner receive financial benefit from recommending the specific treatment I’ve been prescribed? Is the prescribing clinician financially independent of the dispensing process? If the answer is unclear or not forthcoming, that is a data point.

If you have concerns about a prescriber or a business model, AHPRA’s CEO has specifically invited the public to contact AHPRA with concerns about practitioners or organisational arrangements.

For GPs in traditional practice, this guidance is primarily background context rather than a new clinical obligation — the existing code of conduct already covers conflicts of interest. What changes is the explicit signal that enforcement is being taken seriously in the telehealth sector, and that the standards apply equally regardless of how care is delivered.

The guidance doesn’t ask practitioners to stop profiting from healthcare. It asks them not to let the profit motive override the patient’s interest. That bar has always existed. AHPRA is now saying clearly that they are watching to see if it is being cleared.

Verdict: yes — if you or someone you care for receives treatment through a platform with a financial stake in the treatment prescribed, the questions AHPRA is asking practitioners to answer are worth asking as a patient.