Allied Health professionals deserve better than a spreadsheet and a prayer at renewal time.

A few months ago, The Allied Health Hub made a formal submission to Ahpra's public consultation on the review of the Recency of Practice and Continuing Professional Development registration standards.

It was our first submission as an organisation. And it felt like the right thing to do. Not because we have regulatory authority, but because we talk to Allied Health practitioners and providers every day, and we hear the same frustrations repeatedly.

CPD is hard to find. Most practitioners are tracking their development across a mix of certificates, emails, spreadsheets and memory. Reflection happens as an afterthought at renewal, if at all. And the systems practitioners use to track their development were never really built for them. They were built for associations, or for individual professions, or simply inherited from a pre-digital era.

What we submitted

We didn't comment on every question. We focused on the areas where we have direct experience and a genuine perspective.

On the CPD portfolio requirement: We support it. Formalising the portfolio as a registration standard is the right move. But the standard will only be as useful as the guidance that accompanies it. Practitioners need to know what a compliant record looks like at audit, including whether a digital export from a platform like ours is acceptable evidence. Without that clarity, the standard creates obligation without confidence.

On interactive CPD: We support the five-hour minimum and argued it shouldn't be set lower. We also recommended that Ahpra explicitly recognise platform-based activities as interactive: structured forum discussions, live Q&As, peer-moderated groups, virtual supervision sessions. These are how Allied Health professionals are increasingly learning and practitioners who complete them shouldn't be left wondering whether their hours count.

On cross-disciplinary accessibility: This one matters to us deeply. CPD across Allied Health is siloed by discipline, association and platform. There is no single place where practitioners across professions can find, access and record their development. That's a structural problem, not a practitioner problem. Ahpra's portfolio specification has an opportunity to be discipline-agnostic, and that would be a significant step forward.

Why we think this matters

We're not a regulator. We're not a professional association. We're a platform, and we have a practical stake in how these standards are written.

If Ahpra publishes a clear digital portfolio specification on what fields are required, what evidence types are acceptable, whether exported records from platforms satisfy the five-year retention requirement, it makes CPD compliance less anxiety-inducing and more useful. 

Practitioners focus on learning rather than paperwork. That's better for everyone.

We'd love to hear from you

What's your experience with CPD tracking and compliance? Do you think the proposed changes move in the right direction? Is there something Ahpra got right, or something you think they've missed?

This is the kind of conversation The Allied Health Hub exists for. Share your thoughts below or join the discussion in the community on The Hub.