Remediation courses for Optometrists facing an Ahpra notification, complaint or investigation

Start with the Core Set above. Those nine cover both halves of what a Board reads: the standards you are judged against — Ethics and Ethical Standards for Optometrists, and Professionalism and Professional Standards for Optometrists — and what it weighs once the facts are settled: insight, reflection, remediation, assurance the concern will not recur, and how the process itself works. They apply to every notification whatever the allegation.

Then add the courses that match the concern actually raised. Use the selector above: choose the type of concern in your letter and you will see the courses that address it directly.

Speak to your professional indemnity insurer before you respond. They will tell you what evidence is appropriate for your particular matter. Each course is A$200 and carries 2 CPD hours; the Bulk Buy Offer covers any five for A$850 or any ten for A$1,400, saving up to A$600.

It depends on where you practise. In most of Australia, Ahpra and the Optometry Board of Australia manage the notification.

In New South Wales they have no role: the Optometry Council of NSW works with the Health Care Complaints Commission, because NSW did not adopt Part 8 of the National Law. The two share information and decide together which of them manages your matter, and the Council can manage a less serious conduct matter itself by directing you to attend a counselling meeting rather than referring it on. In Queensland, the Office of the Health Ombudsman receives every complaint, retains the most serious, and may refer others to Ahpra.

Between them, New South Wales and Queensland account for roughly half the optometrists in Australia. Check the letterhead on your letter, because it tells you which body you are dealing with.

One answer worth having early: if you are an optical dispenser rather than a registered optometrist, none of these bodies is your regulator. Optical dispensing is not a registered profession under the National Law, so Ahpra and the Optometry Board have no jurisdiction over it. A concern about a dispenser goes to the Health Care Complaints Commission in New South Wales, the Office of the Health Ombudsman in Queensland, or the equivalent body in your state — and to your employer. The courses still apply; the process does not.

Immediate action is the Optometry Board restricting or suspending your registration while a matter is still being investigated, where it believes that is necessary to protect the public. It is protective rather than punitive and is not a finding against you.

It usually follows a show cause process giving you a short window to respond. Contact your professional indemnity insurer the same day. What you produce in that first fortnight matters more than anything you produce later.

Yes. Healthcare Ethics Courses issues a CPD certificate for every course, recording 2 CPD hours, the course title and the date of completion. That is what makes it usable as evidence in a response, a remediation plan or a portfolio.

On accreditation: the courses are aligned with Optometry Board of Australia and Ahpra guidelines and standards, but are not accredited by an external Australian body. Confirm with the Board how the hours should be recorded against your own CPD requirements.

Access runs for twelve months from the date of purchase. You start immediately, work at your own pace, and there is no schedule to keep to within that period.

Finishing a course does not end your access. Once you have completed it and downloaded your certificate you can return to the material as often as you like for the rest of the twelve months, at no further cost.

No. The certificate records the date you completed the course, and that date does not change. Revisiting the material inside your twelve months does not produce a newly dated one.

If you need a certificate carrying a later date — because a Board, an employer or a tribunal has asked for recent evidence — you buy the course again. Within twelve months of your original purchase a repeat is half price; after twelve months it is the full A$200.

No. No course, from us or from anyone else, determines the outcome of a notification, an investigation or a tribunal matter, and any provider suggesting otherwise is worth treating with caution.

What a course can do is help you build the insight and reflection your response needs, and give you a dated, verifiable certificate to evidence it. How much weight that carries depends on the circumstances of the individual case.

Four things, and the order matters. Whether you understand what went wrong. Whether you accept responsibility for your part in it. Whether you recognise the effect it had — on the patient, on colleagues, and on public confidence in the profession. And whether you can show meaningful change as a result.

Many responses supply the first and the last and leave out the middle two. That is a common shape of a finding that insight is lacking. The Insight, Reflection and Remediation modules address each in turn.

Yes. There is no registration check and no requirement to hold current registration. The courses are taken as often by optometrists who are suspended, who have conditions on their registration, or who are working towards re-registration as they are by those with a live notification.

If conditions require you to complete specific education, check the wording with your professional indemnity insurer or lawyer before choosing, so that what you complete matches what was ordered.

More than the code. The Board publishes Guidelines for use of scheduled medicines, in effect since 18 October 2019, and they apply more widely than many optometrists assume: to anyone with general registration who uses a scheduled medicine for diagnostic purposes, as well as to optometrists whose registration carries the endorsement. You do not have to be endorsed to be assessed against them.

Where the endorsement does apply, it authorises you to administer, obtain, possess, prescribe, supply or use topical Schedule 2, 3 and 4 medicines for the practice of optometry — but only to the extent the drugs and poisons legislation of your own state or territory allows. Two sets of rules govern the same act, and a response that addresses only the national one is half an answer.

The guidelines also set referral triggers. An optometrist who has begun treating a patient for chronic glaucoma must refer to an ophthalmologist within four months and give the patient a copy of that referral. Where a referral was late or absent, that is usually the first thing a Board looks for.

Yes. Courses are taken privately online at your own pace. We never share participant details with Ahpra, the Optometry Board, the Optometry Council of NSW, the HCCC, the OHO, an employer or an indemnity provider unless you choose to do so yourself.

Many optometrists complete a course before deciding whether to include it in a submission at all.

The Code of conduct itself. Unlike some National Boards, the Optometry Board publishes no standalone boundaries guideline: the expectations sit inside the shared code, which has applied in its current form since 29 June 2022. A remediation plan that goes looking for a separate document will not find one, and citing another Board’s guideline is worse than citing nothing.

Optometry raises the question in its own way. An eye examination is conducted at close range, in a darkened room, often on the same patients every two years across decades, and increasingly in a retail setting where the clinical relationship and a sale sit side by side. The code places responsibility for maintaining the boundary on the optometrist rather than the patient.

Sexual misconduct in connection with practice is separately notifiable conduct under the National Law, which is why an allegation in this category can reach the Board from a colleague or an employer rather than from the patient. Contact your professional indemnity insurer before responding to an allegation in this category, and before contacting the patient or anyone connected with them.

Yes, and often particularly so. Optometrists who trained overseas are sometimes navigating an unfamiliar regulatory system at the same time as responding to a concern, and the vocabulary differs from what they learnt — notification rather than complaint, immediate action rather than interim order, cancellation rather than erasure.

The courses are written to Australian standards and explain the process in Australian terms.