3 September 2026 · 8 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh

Advertising inside the rules

Half the direct response playbook is unavailable to a regulated health service in Australia. That is a design brief, not an obstacle. Here is the box, with every rule sourced, and what goes in it instead.

Roughly half the direct response playbook is closed to a clinic in Australia. Reviews about treatment, before and after galleries, countdown offers, product names and per unit prices are the tools most categories reach for first, and all of them are restricted or prohibited here. Dentists, doctors, nurses and anyone providing a regulated health service advertise under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, and where prescription medicines are involved, under the Therapeutic Goods Act too.

This is the box we build inside on every clinic account, so it is worth publishing rather than explaining on a call. Each rule below is attributed to its source. Alongside each one is what we actually run in its place, because a list of prohibitions is a compliance document and what a clinic needs is a campaign.

The rules bind us as much as you

Everyone advertising the service, not only the practitioner. AHPRA states the requirements apply to registered practitioners, to individuals who are not registered, and to businesses and corporate entities, and that advertisers are responsible for content produced by others on their behalf. That covers your agency, your web developer and whoever runs your social accounts. Its cosmetic guidance adds that anyone who authorises the advertising is responsible for it, including the owner.

Worth being blunt about what that means commercially. An agency that hands you creative it has not checked is handing you its own exposure, and any agency working in this category that has not read the source documents is finding out about them through you.

The five things section 133 prohibits

AHPRA's own summary of the law is short enough to quote. Section 133 states that a person must not advertise a regulated health service, or a business that provides one, in a way that:

• is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to be misleading or deceptive
• offers a gift, discount or other inducement to attract a person to use the service or business, unless the advertisement also states the terms and conditions of the offer
• uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business
• creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment, or
• directly or indirectly encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of regulated health services.

The detail sits in the Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, developed jointly by the National Boards under section 39 of the National Law. The current version took effect on 14 December 2020.

Read as a creative brief rather than as law, those five lines remove the promise, the proof, the urgency and the discount. What is left is the practitioner, the clinic, the process and the next step. That is a narrower palette than most categories work with and it is entirely workable, which the rest of this is about.

Testimonials, and what we use instead

You cannot use testimonials about the clinical aspects of your service in advertising you control. AHPRA defines testimonials as recommendations or positive statements about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service, and says clinical aspects refers to statements about symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcome.

The distinction that saves most clinics is that not every positive comment is a testimonial. AHPRA states that comments about customer service or communication style that do not include a reference to clinical aspects are not considered testimonials for the purposes of the National Law.

What you control decides the rest. AHPRA says advertisers must remove testimonials from the advertising they control, naming a clinic Facebook page as the example. Patients posting reviews of their own accord is not your breach. Republishing them is. In the higher risk cosmetic guidelines, linking to testimonials on third party sites, re-sharing patient posts, and even liking a review all count as using one.

The practical consequence for us is that social proof has to come from somewhere other than the patient's mouth. What is left is genuinely strong and under used: the practitioner on camera explaining how a consultation runs, the clinic itself, tenure, qualifications, the number of years a practice has been in one suburb, professional memberships, and the plain unglamorous detail of what happens at an appointment. Creative built from that ages better than a wall of five star quotes anyway, because it is specific to one clinic and cannot be copied by the practice down the road.

Before and after images

Not banned, but conditional. AHPRA's general guidance says advertising may breach the National Law where it is not clear how the advertised treatment directly caused the benefit shown, or where images are not genuine or have been edited or enhanced.

For higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures the requirements are specific. Images must be of actual patients treated by that practitioner, must not be edited with filters or retouching, and must match on lighting, angle, background, framing, exposure, posture, clothing and makeup. The most prominent image must be the before image or a combined one, because leading with the after image may create unrealistic expectations. Every outcome image must carry a prominent warning that the outcome is only relevant to that patient, and images of people under 18 must not be used.

Our position on this is usually to skip it. Meeting the matched conditions requires a photographic setup and a consent process most clinics do not have, the compliant version of the image is much less striking than the non compliant one everybody has in mind, and the ad platforms apply their own restrictions on top. The budget goes further on clinic footage and practitioner pieces, which carry no equivalent obligation.

Inducements, discounts and urgency

Offers are permitted with a condition attached, and the condition is the part people skip. Section 133 prohibits offering a gift, discount or other inducement unless the advertisement also states the terms and conditions. AHPRA adds those terms must be clear, accurate, honest and easy to find.

Urgency is treated more cautiously. AHPRA says phrases such as do not delay or for a limited time only create a sense of urgency and may be unlawful where they are linked to unsubstantiated claims that a person's health may suffer without the service. The trigger is that link, not the deadline alone. In the cosmetic guidelines AHPRA adds that those procedures must not be offered as a competition prize.

In the ad account this changes the format rather than the idea. Terms in the advertisement means in the creative, not behind a link, which means the offer has to be simple enough to state in a line. That is a discipline rather than a cost. Complicated offers convert badly in a feed regardless of what the regulator thinks, and an offer you cannot say in one sentence was usually not a good offer.

Why the ad cannot name the product

This one is the TGA rather than AHPRA. Most cosmetic injectables contain substances in Schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard, and under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 those cannot be advertised to the public.

In its FAQs on advertising health services and cosmetic injections, last updated 21 July 2026, the TGA states it no longer expressly permits references to terms such as wrinkle reducing injections or dermal fillers where a reasonable consumer would understand the intention is to promote the use or supply of a prescription-only medicine, and that this includes acronyms, nicknames, abbreviations and hashtags. Stating a price for such a product, total or per unit, is likely to be an advertisement for it.

The TGA is equally clear about what works instead: focus advertising on the consultations available rather than the medicines used. It declines to publish a list of acceptable substitute terms. Two consequences clinics miss. Public booking systems that let a consumer self-select prescription-only treatments, or show prices for them, are likely unlawful advertisements. And all social posts, historical and new, must comply.

This is the single hardest constraint in the category and it deserves more than a paragraph, so it has its own article. The short version is that the campaign gets built around the consultation and the practitioner, and it behaves differently in the numbers as a result.

How that campaign is actually constructed: advertising a treatment you cannot name

The quick reference

The extra layer for cosmetic work

If any part of your clinic does cosmetic work, a second set of guidelines sits on top of the general ones. The Guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, issued 2 September 2025, apply where a registered practitioner performs them. AHPRA's list of examples begins with dental veneers, alongside cosmetic injectables and thread lifts, so a practice that calls itself general dentistry may already be inside a guideline it has never read.

Three provisions bite immediately. Advertising naming an individual who performs these procedures must include their registration number. Social advertising must be identified as adult content, must not target people under 18, and must not use metadata or hashtags to reach a vulnerable demographic. And much ordinary beauty-brand creative is ruled out, including emojis on outcome images, lifestyle shots, patients' emotional reactions, and phrases such as happier you or best version of yourself.

That last provision is the one that rewrites a media plan. It removes the aspirational register the entire beauty category runs on, which means a clinic cannot simply borrow the creative approach of the brands it sees in the same feed. The registration number requirement also has to be designed into the template rather than added as a caption, because it has to survive every crop and placement the platform generates.

What a breach costs

Advertising breaches may be prosecuted and a court may order a penalty for each offence. AHPRA publishes the maximums: up to $60,000 per offence for an individual and $120,000 for a body corporate, raised in 2022 from $5,000 and $10,000, and applying in all jurisdictions including Western Australia as of July 2024.

$60,000
Maximum financial penalty per advertising offence for an individual under the National Law, and $120,000 for a body corporate. Source: AHPRA, Advertising and the law, accessed September 2026.

The money is rarely the point. AHPRA notes a National Board may decide a breach raises concerns about a practitioner's conduct and take action including placing conditions on their registration.

Which is why we treat the compliance pass as a build step rather than a review step. A creative concept that has to be repaired after it is made usually cannot be repaired, and the version that survives the edit is a weaker ad than the one that was designed inside the box from the start.

How we build inside this

1. Read the source documents rather than a summary, this one included, and give them to whoever writes the ads.
2. Audit what already exists: website, Google Business Profile, every social account including old posts, and any booking page listing treatments or prices.
3. Separate reviews about service from reviews about clinical outcomes, and stop republishing the second kind.
4. Build the social proof out of the practitioner, the clinic and the process, because that is the ground that is still open and it is harder for a competitor to copy.
5. Write offers simple enough that the terms fit in the advertisement itself.
6. Move injectable advertising to consultations rather than products, and take prescription-only prices off public pages.
7. Design the registration number and any required warning into the creative template, not onto the finished asset.
8. Name one person who signs off advertising before it goes live.

None of this stops a clinic marketing well. It removes the shortcuts, which is a real loss and worth naming rather than talking around. What is left is harder, slower and considerably more durable: a named practitioner, a clinic that is easy to find and easy to book with, an offer stated plainly, and a fast answer to everyone who gets in touch. Those advantages compound. The ones the regulator closed off never did.

The Australian rules are only one of two boxes. The platforms have their own: why Meta rejects clinic ads