Why AHPRA Regulates Health Advertising

Ahpra stands for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and is the national regulatory body for the medical industry across Australia. Ahpra works with 15 national boards to regulate 16 distinct health professions, including medicine, nursing and midwifery, physiotherapy, dentistry, etc. As part of these regulations, Ahpra provides practitioners with guidelines on how practitioners can advertise a regulated health service. In this Article, we will break down and make sense of the AHPRA guidelines for advertising a regulated health service.

How often do AHPRA update their advertising guidelines?

Every AHPRA document on advertising states that the guidelines are reviewed at least every 5 years. Given that the guidelines for advertising a regulated health service were published in 2020, we can expect an update to the original guidelines very soon. We would like to see all 3 documents merged together, so that there are no differences between specialities and a simpler framework that practitioners can work through.

Testimonials and Reviews

The guidelines state that testimonials cannot be used in your advertising. Which means that you shouldn’t display any reviews on your website or on social media. It is also best to turn off your reviews on platforms you actively use in your marketing, such as Facebook

You can still ask your patients to leave a review on platforms such as your Google Business Profile, but the guidelines recommend that you don’t interact with the review. Interacting with a review could be seen as using it as advertising. This also means that if you receive a negative review, you should avoid responding to it online and instead contact the patient directly offline to resolve the issue.

Titles and Qualifications: What You Can Call Yourself

Whilst in advertising, it can be helpful to use a descriptive term to inform potential patients about a particular focus. The use of a title must not lead a potential patient to believe that the practitioner has a specialist registration or an endorsement that they do not actually hold.

Until 2023, practitioners with general registration who performed surgical procedures could refer to themselves as surgeons. In 2023, Ahpra implemented new rules around using the title of surgeon. Restricting the title to medical practitioners with specialist registration in surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, or ophthalmology.

Within the cosmetic surgery and non-surgical space, when advertising a specific practitioner. You must clearly display their credentials so that their registration is clear. i.e., Dr J (MED000678910) Registered medical practitioner, specialist plastic surgeon (specialist registration in surgery – plastic surgery). We would extend this as best practice for all medical practitioners to make this information easily displayed.

Before and After Photos

Before-and-after images are a great way to showcase the outcomes of a product or service. There are several steps and guidelines regarding the before-and-after images that need to be taken into consideration when you are taking them.

When taking both before-and-after images, care must be taken to ensure the images are as similar in content as possible. This means taking photos with consistent angles, lighting, and makeup so that these factors do not influence the after photo

Images must also not be edited or photoshopped to smooth skin, airbrush, or apply filters, as this could be misleading about the outcomes of the procedure or minimise the appearance of side effects, such as bruising.

Claims, Evidence and the TGA Overlap

When making a claim that a procedure can achieve an outcome, acceptable evidence must support the claim. AHPRA provides a framework to assess whether if evidence is acceptable here.

Evidence that is generally not considered acceptable evidence includes

• Self-assessment studies
• Anecdotal evidence or evidence observed in practice
• Outcome studies or audits
• Before and after studies with few or no controls
• Studies involving no human subjects

It is important to note that, throughout the guidelines. Certain terms or phrases will be mentioned that you cannot use, regardless of the evidence you pr need to be careful to avoid terminology that idealises the procedure.

Channel by Channel: Websites, Google Ads, Social Media and GBP

Let’s have a chat about some of the most common marketing channels and a few things to watch out for. We will cover these further in-depth in future articles

Your Website: Service Pages, Claims and Disclaimers

When you are creating your service pages, it is important to not to glamorise the procedure or minimise the potential risks & complications associated with a procedure or service. When discussing procedure pages with our clients, we like to explain that going in-depth top explain every nuance of a procedure. Including suitable candidates, recovery information, potential complications, and even those who may not be suitable candidates, fulfils the AHPRA guidelines. It also helps your website to rank better on Google. When a user searches for a particular procedure, Google wants to direct them to the best resource relating to that search term. So we need to make your website the best resource for all of your products and services. The benefits of this are threefold: potential patients will arrive at their initial consultation already educated about the procedure and with a basic understanding of what to expect.

Google Ads: Compliant Copy in 30 Characters

This is an area where we commonly see non-compliant ads being run by agencies that use auto-generated titles and descriptions. Because Google Ads is shown to many people at the top of search results, it can quickly get practices in hot water with AHPRA.

The ad you might see in search results is not the only variation of the ad. This is because when creating an Ad, you have to provide Google 8-10 unique headlines, with 4 descriptions that Google will AB test when optimising your ad campaign

Our recommendation, if you are running Google Ads with an external agency, is to review all ad headlines and descriptions to verify compliance.

Google Business Profile: Reviews You Can’t Control

Your Google Business Profile is the best place to get patients to leave your practice a review. The more high-quality reviews you have, the higher your business will rank in the local search pack on Google. The one caveat to collecting reviews on Google is that you should avoid responding to or interacting with any reviews on your page, as this may be seen as using a testimonial in advertising under the national guidelines

Email and Lead Magnets: The Forgotten Channel

Email marketing is one of the most underutilised marketing tools in the medical industry. Email marketing is a powerful way to stay front of mind with your past customers and your leads that have downloaded your lead magnet. A lead magnet example could be an ebook in which you explain the procedure or service you provide in even greater depth. This is a helpful resource to help those sitting on the fence commit to a consultation.

From a compliance perspective, there are no special rules relating directly to email marketing. We can evaluate email marketing in the same way that we would evaluate content on a website.

Advertisers that are found to be in breach of the National Law

Aphra takes a risk-based approach to advertisers that are in breach of the national guidelines. According to the Ahpra guidelines “Compliance and enforcement action will escalate depending on the ongoing assessment of risk and whether the advertiser is willing to comply”. In most cases, we have seen that a notice of non-compliance is issued to the practitioner first.

Ahpra has enforcement tools under the national law, which include the power to

• investigate a practitioner’s conduct
• impose conditions on the practitioners’ registration, such as restricting their ability to advertise their services
• take disciplinary action in a panel or tribunal
•  prosecute, which may lead to a financial penalty.

Advertisers whose advertising is found to be in breach of the national law, may be prosecuted and ordered to pay a penalty of up to $5,000 per offence for individuals and up to $10,000 per offence for a body corporate.

A Practical Compliance Checklist

Our team at Caffeinated Marketing have put together an 11-page compliance checklist document that you can use when evaluating your current advertising. This will give you a guide as to how compliant your marketing is and any grey areas that you may need to investigate further. You can access the document here