Compliance
Marketing that will not have to come down later
Most of the marketing sold to healthcare practices would not survive a complaint. Testimonial pages, before and after galleries, ads naming the medicine you prescribe, a website promising to fix a condition.
None of that is a grey area. All of it is prohibited in advertising a regulated health service, and the registration on the line is yours, not your agency's.
The rules we build inside
The National Law and AHPRA
The Health Practitioner Regulation National Law sets what you may and may not say when advertising a regulated health service. AHPRA and the National Boards enforce it, and their advertising guidelines set out how.
The TGA
The Therapeutic Goods Administration governs how medicines and medical devices may be advertised. Prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public at all.
Google and Meta
Both run separate healthcare advertising policies that sit on top of the law. Meta (Facebook and Instagram) prohibits ads implying knowledge of a person's health, which rules out most of the copy an agency will instinctively write for a clinic.
Privacy and consumer law
The Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles cover patient information. Australian Consumer Law covers misleading claims, offers and comparisons.
What this means in practice
- Testimonials are the big one.
Section 133 of the National Law prohibits using testimonials in advertising a regulated health service. That means any comment about clinical care, treatment effectiveness, an outcome, or a practitioner's skill.
A comment about the experience of visiting your clinic, that the rooms were clean or the reception staff were helpful, is not a clinical testimonial and is allowed.
- Reviews on Google are a special case.
You are not responsible for what a patient posts on a platform you do not control, and you do not have to take it down. The moment you republish it on your own website or in an ad, it becomes your advertising and the prohibition applies.
You can ask patients for reviews. You cannot ask them to review their treatment or their results.
- Before and after imagery
is tightly controlled and, where it implies a clinical outcome, is treated as a testimonial.
- Prescription-only medicines
cannot be named, shown, or hinted at in anything aimed at the public. This catches weight-loss and cosmetic clinics constantly. You can advertise the consultation and the programme. You cannot advertise the drug.
- Claims need evidence.
"May help with" is defensible. "Treats", "fixes" or "cures" usually is not. Comparative claims like best, leading or number one need substantiation, and protected titles cannot be used by a practitioner who does not hold them.
- Offers need terms.
Any discount, gift, package or bonus needs its terms and conditions stated in the advertisement or one click away, and free has to mean free.
What it costs to get this wrong
Since 2022 the maximum penalty for an advertising offence under the National Law is
$60,000
per offence, for an individual
$120,000
per offence, for a body corporate
Western Australia has not adopted the increase.
AHPRA takes a tiered approach. Most first breaches get a written notice and a deadline to fix it. Repeated non-compliance leads to audits and show cause letters proposing conditions on your registration. High-risk matters, which includes claims about curing serious illness and marketing aimed at vulnerable people, can go straight to prosecution.
Enforcement outcomes and case studies are published.
We are not telling you this to frighten you into buying something. We are telling you because most practices we speak to have something on their website right now that would attract a notice, and nobody has mentioned it to them.
How we handle it
- 1
We check what is already there.
Before we build anything, we go through your existing site, ads and social for the things above. You get the list whether or not you hire us.
- 2
We write to the rules rather than around them.
Educational content, clear service descriptions, qualified claims. It is not a workaround, it is what patients are searching for anyway.
- 3
Everything is reviewed before it publishes.
Every page, ad, landing page, caption and campaign. Nothing goes live without it.
- 4
Clinical content carries a practitioner's name.
We write it, someone qualified at your practice approves it.
- 5
We watch for changes.
Guidelines move. When they do we review your published material and fix what needs fixing, as part of the plan rather than as a change request.
What this is not
It is a marketing review by people who do this for healthcare practices every day. It is not legal advice, it is not certification, and it does not transfer responsibility for compliance away from your registration.
We are a marketing agency, not a law firm or a regulator. Where something is genuinely unclear we will tell you it is unclear and suggest you get advice, rather than guess and publish.
Nobody can guarantee you will never receive a complaint. What we can do is not be the reason you get one.
Free
Free AHPRA website check
Send us your website address and we will go through your public pages against the requirements above and send back what we find. Page by page, plain language, no obligation.
- Page by page
- Plain language
- No obligation
Questions practices ask about compliance
Our current website has a testimonials page. What happens now?
It comes down or it gets rewritten. We will show you which comments are clinical and which are not, and most practices find some of it can stay in a different form.
Our competitor does all of this and nothing has happened to them.
Often true. AHPRA is complaint-driven as well as proactive, so plenty of non-compliant marketing sits online untouched for years. It stops being true the day a competitor or a patient reports it.
Does this apply to us if we are not registered practitioners?
The National Law applies to advertising a regulated health service, which can cover the business as well as the practitioner. If your practice provides a service delivered by registered practitioners, assume it applies.
Can we still run before and after content?
Sometimes, depending on the treatment, the setting and how it is presented. It is one of the genuinely nuanced areas and we will walk through where the line sits for your practice rather than give a blanket answer here.
Do you charge extra for the compliance review?
No. It is part of everything we publish, on the core plan and on every accelerator.
Is this just a way of selling us more?
The check is free and you keep the findings. Plenty of practices take the list and fix it themselves.