AHPRA Registration
AHPRA registration is the national registration held by practitioners in Australia's 16 regulated health professions — including medicine, nursing, psychology, pharmacy, physiotherapy and paramedicine. There is a single national register covering the whole country, with no separate state-by-state checks. Oho confirms an AHPRA registration against that official register.
Who needs it
Any worker practising in a regulated health profession. A valid registration applies nationally rather than per state.
What Oho needs
The AHPRA registration number. No date of birth.
MED0001234567 — three letters identifying the profession, then ten digits.
The letters aren't decoration: they tell Oho which profession the registration is for, so you don't need to record that separately. NMW for nursing and midwifery, PSY for psychology, PHA for pharmacy, and so on — whatever is printed on the practitioner's registration.
Case doesn't matter; Oho upper-cases it. Spaces are trimmed.
The registration number finds the record; the name is what proves it's your worker's record. If the name Oho holds doesn't match the register's, the check comes back as no match and Oho withholds the registry details rather than showing you someone else's registration.
Name matching is forgiving about what doesn't matter — case, accents, punctuation, middle names, a first initial, given and family name the wrong way round, and titles like Dr or Prof. If the first attempt doesn't match, Oho retries with the worker's alternate or preferred name.
What it won't do is quietly accept a mismatch. A transposed digit in the registration number finds a real other practitioner, and that's exactly the case the name check catches.
Before you start
Nothing. The AHPRA register is public, so there's no login or API key to provide.
How Oho verifies it
Oho looks the registration number up on the public AHPRA register. The answer carries more than a status: the practitioner's name, their profession, the type of registration they hold — General, Specialist, Provisional, Limited, Non-Practising or Student — when it expires, and any conditions or restrictions on it.
Two things about timing, because AHPRA is the slowest of the public registers:
- Checks are queued, not instant. AHPRA rate-limits hard, so Oho paces requests through a shared queue well under the register's limit. A check normally lands within a few minutes and can take up to ten at busy times. That's the queue, not a fault.
- Re-checks are weekly, not daily. Health registration moves slowly, so Oho asks less often here than it does of the WWCC registers.
Note that Under review covers registration types that are inherently restricted — Provisional, Limited and Student registration — not only explicit conditions on an otherwise general registration.
Reading the result
Every check resolves to one of these outcomes:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value |
|---|---|---|---|
| May engage | Green | Valid and current — the person is cleared for the work. | MAY_ENGAGE |
| May not engage | Red | Not valid — expired, suspended, not found, or a match on a ban register. | MAY_NOT_ENGAGE |
| Under review | Yellow | Cleared, but worth a closer look — for example a condition on the clearance, a possible match, or an expiry coming up. | REVIEW_REQUIRED |
| In progress | Grey | Still being checked. | IN_PROGRESS |
| Error | Grey | The source couldn't be reached; Oho will try again. | ERROR |
AHPRA's answer maps as follows, in this order:
| What the register holds | What Oho shows | Why |
|---|---|---|
Not Registered | May not engage | Cancelled, lapsed or suspended — not currently registered |
Registered, but Non-Practising | May not engage | A real registration that doesn't permit practice |
Registered, expiry date passed | May not engage | The registration has run out |
Registered, with conditions or a restricted type | Under review | Current, but restricted — including Provisional, Limited and Student registration |
Registered, expiring within 30 days | May engage | Current, flagged as expiring |
Registered, clear | May engage | Current and unrestricted |
A practitioner on Non-Practising registration is genuinely registered — they just aren't permitted to practise. It's an easy one to wave through, because the register does say "Registered". Oho treats it as May not engage, and so should you.
A conditional registration is valid. The conditions might be irrelevant to the role you're engaging them for, or they might be decisive — that's a judgement Oho can't make for you, so it routes to a person. Open the check and read the conditions rather than treating amber as a failure.
When it doesn't verify
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The number won't submit | It isn't three letters followed by ten digits | Check the profession prefix and the digit count against the practitioner's registration |
| May not engage — no match, and no registry detail shown | The number found a record whose name didn't match your worker's, so Oho withheld the details | Check the number for a transposed digit, then the name. Add the practitioner's alternate name if they've changed it |
| May not engage — not current | Registration cancelled, lapsed or suspended | Not a data problem. The practitioner needs to resolve it with AHPRA |
| May not engage on a registered person | Almost always Non-Practising registration | Open the check and look at the registration type |
| Under review | Conditions or restrictions, or a Provisional, Limited or Student registration | Read the detail and decide whether it bears on this role |
| Error | The register was unreachable or returned something unparseable | Nothing. Oho retries on the next run |
Renewals & monitoring
Renewals flow through automatically — the registration number doesn't change on renewal, and the register returns the new expiry date with each check, so Oho's expiry tracking stays accurate without you maintaining it.
AHPRA also flags an approaching expiry itself: a registration within 30 days of expiry reads as May engage but is marked as expiring, so you get a prompt while the practitioner still has time to renew.
Between renewals, the weekly re-check is what catches a suspension or a new condition — and because AHPRA holds conditions rather than just a yes/no, a change here can move a worker from green to amber rather than straight to red.