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We were pleased to welcome Ms Meryl Zweck as the newest member of the Osteopathy Board of Australia at our October Board meeting. With her appointment, as community member, the Board now comprises a full complement of nine members from across Australia.
In this edition of our newsletter, we highlight two important aspects of the Code of conduct: maintaining accurate clinical records and the considerations involved in treating family and friends.
It is time to renew your registration to practise. This year, a new system is in place, and you should have already received emails from Ahpra about setting up your access. Before renewing, please make sure your professional indemnity insurance is current and ongoing, and that your CPD records are up to date. Keep in mind, you could be selected for audit.
Adjunct Associate Professor Paul Orrock Chair, Osteopathy Board of Australia
The Board is pleased to announce that its article 'Trends in retention and attrition among osteopaths in Australia: Insights from the Workforce Retention and Attrition Project', is now available online in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijosm.2025.100793.
Board Chair Paul Orrock will be speaking about this research and wider workforce mobility issues at the Osteopathic International Alliance conference in Toronto in November. This will be an opportunity to share Australia’s regulatory initiatives with international colleagues.
Board members Bec Malon and Tim McNamara also presented on these topics at the September conference in Auckland, where they joined a panel alongside regulators from New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Registration renewal for osteopaths is now open. Make sure to renew your registration by 30 November 2025 to avoid paying a late fee.
If you don’t renew before 31 December 2025, your registration will lapse, you’ll be removed from the register of practitioners, and you won’t be able to use the protected title, osteopath.
Ahpra has a new online portal to manage all aspects of your registration, including multifactor authentication (MFA) to provide an extra layer of security protecting your data.
Read more and access online renewal at the Board website.
Before you renew, you will need to link an authenticator app to your portal. This app generates a one-time 6-digit code and is more secure than sending the code by SMS. Every time you log in, you’ll enter:
If you already know your username and password, you can log in now and link MFA. Your username will be sent to you via email before you need to renew. If you haven’t received this email, please contact us via an online enquiry or call 1300 419 495 (within Australia) +61 3 9125 3010 (overseas callers).
If you share your email account with someone else, such as your partner, or use a group email such as ‘[email protected]’ then you will need to change it to an email that is unique to you when you first log in. There’s information available on the Ahpra portal help centre on how to do this.
The Board invites all osteopaths registered in the ACT (and those 100km adjacent in NSW) to an evening forum in Canberra starting at 5:15pm on Thursday 27 November 2025.
The forum is a great opportunity for you to hear directly from the Board about recent and upcoming consultations, changes to requirements, additional resources, and a chance to meet local senior Ahpra staff.
If you would like to attend this function, please use this form to RSVP, no later than Sunday 9 November 2025.
The Board’s quarterly registration data to 30 June 2025 has been released. There were 3,646 registered osteopaths nationally at this date: 3,451 with general registration, 2 with provisional registration and 193 with non-practising registration.
For further data breakdowns by age, gender and principal place of practice, visit the Board’s Statistics page to read the report.
The issue of treating family and friends gets raised from time to time. The shared Code of conduct has a specific section 4.8 Personal relationships:
'Good practice includes recognising the potential conflicts, risks and complexities of providing care* to those in a close personal relationship. Providing care to anyone you have a close personal relationship with, for example close friends, work colleagues and family members; can be inappropriate because of the lack of objectivity, possible discontinuity of care and risks to the practitioner or patient.
If circumstances require you to provide care to someone in a close relationship, for example in an emergency, good practice requires that you:
The code advises that providing care to anyone in a close personal relationship can be inappropriate because of the risks associated with a lack of objectivity.
Sometimes it may be reasonable for an osteopath to treat a close friend or family member – for example, if they live in a remote location with no other osteopaths nearby and a relative has a sports injury that needs immediate care. In this case the osteopath should carefully weigh up the risks before going ahead.
To help manage the additional risks, the osteopath can set clear boundaries such as providing care during business hours and making sure the relative knows they can stop treatment at any time.
If they are concerned their clinical judgement might be affected, they should refer their relative to another osteopath for an opinion.
Otherwise, they must provide the same standard of care as they would for any other patient and keep accurate records of consent and all treatment provided.
The Board will retire its Guidelines on clinical records on 1 December 2025. In preparation, osteopaths are encouraged to review the shared Code of conduct which includes regulatory guidance on record keeping at 8.3 Health records.
It documents the importance of maintaining clear and accurate health records for the continuing good care of patients or clients. It details what the Board considers to be good practice in relation to health records, such as:
a. keep accurate, up-to-date, factual, objective and legible records that report relevant details of clinical history, clinical findings, investigations, information given to patients, medication and other management in a form that can be understood by other health practitioners
b. ensure that records are held securely and are not subject to unauthorised access. This includes protecting the privacy and integrity of electronic records
c. ensure that records show respect for patients and do not include demeaning or derogatory remarks
d. ensure that records are sufficient to facilitate continuity of care
e. make records at the time of events or as soon as possible afterwards
f. recognise the right of patients to access information contained in their health records and facilitate that access, and
g. promptly facilitate the transfer or management (including disposal) of health information in accordance with legislation on privacy and health records when requested by patients, or when closing or relocating a practice.
The Board’s expectations about health records are also detailed in other parts of the Code of conduct, including under the headings:
Additional resources to support osteopaths to meet their professional obligations are available at Ahpra's Managing health records page and on the Board's Codes and guidelines page and include:
The first step in applying for registration is to create Ahpra account, set up your portal and link multifactor authentication. Your portal is where you will manage all aspects of your registration throughout your career as a registered osteopath.
We have an online portal help centre with step-by-step instructions and videos on how to create your portal and securely link your multifactor authentication app.
On the Graduate applications page of the Ahpra website, you will find helpful guides on completing your application for registration, tips for how to avoid delays, and information flyers you can download for working offline. There is also a page of Frequently asked questions that go into more detail on a range of topics.
You may need to provide supporting documents with your application to prove that you meet the Board’s registration standards including meeting the English language skills requirements. Make sure you provide all the documents we need with your application so we can assess it quicker.
We can’t finalise your application until we receive your graduation results from your education provider.
If you’ve submitted everything needed to prove you’ve met the requirements for registration, we aim to finalise your application within two weeks of receiving your graduation results.
For more information, read the news item.
Recently appointed Ahpra CEO Justin Untersteiner called for renewed collaboration at the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme’s annual accreditation meeting in Melbourne, describing Ahpra as stewards of Australia’s health system.
Reflecting on four months of national stakeholder engagement, Justin acknowledged the opportunities and challenges ahead and discussed current priorities including improving notifications, preventing harm, ending racism in healthcare, and ensuring a responsive workforce.
Justin urged stakeholders to take a system-wide view and collaborate across Ahpra, boards, accreditors, and educators to better meet evolving workforce needs.
‘As stewards of the health system, we must all accept responsibility for the long-term integrity and sustainability of what has been entrusted to us,’ he said. ‘The nature of our roles – distinct but connected – obliges us to support a health workforce that can support Australia.’
Read the full speech.
The guidance for telehealth and virtual care has been updated to ensure patients receive high-quality care – whether it be in-person, over-the-phone or online.
It expands advice for telehealth prescribers, highlighting poor practice concerns around prescribing that relies on text, email or online questionnaires to assess a patients’ needs rather than a face-to-face, video or telephone consultation.
The guidance reinforces to practitioners that any healthcare provided through telehealth is the practitioner’s responsibility and not the employers. Practitioners working in telehealth-only clinics, particularly those focused on single treatments or medicines, are encouraged to review the clinical governance framework to ensure the care they provide isn’t compromised by commercial gain or convenience.
Good telehealth practices include:
National Boards have also developed case studies for safe use of telehealth, identifying common mistakes like prescribing in an initial telehealth consultation or opting for telehealth when a face-to-face consultation is necessary.
Ahpra and the National Boards have published guidance on the prescribing of medicinal cannabis after concerning reports of patients presenting to emergency departments with medicinal cannabis-induced psychosis.
The guidance reminds prescribers that medicinal cannabis should be treated as a medicine and to be as careful and diligent when prescribing medicinal cannabis as they are when prescribing other drugs of dependence.
‘We don’t prescribe opioids to every patient who asks for them, and medicinal cannabis is no different. Patient demand is no indicator of clinical need,’ Medical Board of Australia Chair Dr Susan O’Dwyer said.
The guidance addresses concerns that profits are being prioritised over patient safety and aims to support practitioners to provide safe care, particularly for those patients at most risk of harm.
Adjunct Professor Veronica Casey AM, Chair of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, urges nurse practitioners within the industry to combine this guidance with their professional practice framework when conducting assessments.
‘Nurses and other registered practitioners must provide holistic care in all areas of their practice. They must take their professional responsibilities with them no matter where they work,’ Adjunct Professor Casey said.
Safe prescribing of medicinal cannabis includes assessing patients thoroughly, formulating and implementing a management plan, facilitating coordination and continuity of care, maintaining medical records, recommending treatments only where there is an identified therapeutic need, ensuring medicinal cannabis is never a first line treatment, and developing an exit strategy from the beginning.
You can read the full media release and the guidance on the Ahpra website.
