RACGP 5th to 6th Edition side by side: where every criterion went

The first question most practice managers ask about the 6th Edition is not "what is new?" It is "where did my stuff go?"

You have spent years building evidence against the 5th Edition. Your last accreditation report is written in 5th Edition codes. Your policies reference C3.1A and GP4.1F. Then the 6th Edition arrives with four new standards, new codes and a new structure, and none of the old labels line up.

The RACGP has published an official mapping between the two editions. This post walks through what it says, standard by standard, and gives you a spreadsheet version of it that you can actually work in.

Before you use any comparison, read this

The RACGP is unusually blunt about the limits of its own mapping, and it is worth repeating because it changes how you should use one.

The mapping is a navigation aid. It tells you which 5th Edition indicators a 6th Edition criterion grew out of. It does not tell you that your existing evidence will satisfy the new criterion. In the RACGP's words, practices should "not assume that a mapped criterion has the same requirements" as its 5th Edition equivalent.

Change categories are applied at the criterion level, so a criterion labelled Retained can still contain new sub-criteria, new terminology or a different assessment expectation. Accreditation against the 6th Edition is assessed against the published Standards, not the mapping.

So use the comparison to find your way around and to plan, then read the full criterion wording before you tick anything off.

Where things stand on timing

Nothing changes for your next visit yet. The 6th Edition was released on 26 August 2026, but the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has not yet published transition arrangements. Until it does, practices are assessed against the 5th Edition under the National General Practice Accreditation Scheme.

That makes now the right time for a side-by-side comparison. You are not rushing to meet a deadline, so you can map your evidence calmly and find the gaps while you still have years, not weeks, to close them.

The shape of the change

The 5th Edition was organised into three modules (Core, Quality Improvement and General Practice) with indicators coded C, QI and GP. The 6th Edition replaces all three with four core standards and one optional standard:

• Foundations of general practice (F)
• Clinical governance (CG)
• Patient participation (PP)
• Continuous quality improvement (CQI)
• Point of care testing, optional, and only if you provide it

Across the four core standards there are 92 criteria. The RACGP's mapping sorts each one into one of three categories:

Standard	Criteria	New	Expanded	Retained / consolidated
Foundations of general practice	32	11	13	8
Clinical governance	40	4	15	21
Patient participation	17	2	10	5
Continuous quality improvement	3	2	1	0
Total	92	19	39	34

Three of the 92 are aspirational rather than required: F8.F (informing patients about digital communication tools), CG3.J (additional demographic information in codable fields) and CQI1.C (environmental impact measurement).

The table tells you something useful straight away. The real change is in Foundations. Eleven of its 32 criteria are new, more than every other standard combined. Clinical governance, the largest standard, is mostly retained. That is where your existing clinical evidence is most likely to carry across.

Foundations of general practice

Foundations is the 6th Edition's home for how the practice is run: planning, governance, people, information and technology. Much of it grew out of the 5th Edition's Core Standard 3 (practice governance and management) and Core Standard 6 (information management), and much of it is new.

What is new here

• F1.A Mission, vision and values and F1.F Governance framework. Most practices have a mission statement somewhere. Few have a documented governance framework.
• F1.D Document control and version management. The mapping links this only to the 5th Edition's "various policy review requirements". It is now a criterion of its own, which means your system for versioning, reviewing and retiring policies is assessed directly rather than inferred.
• F3.A to F3.C Climate resilience, sustainability strategies, and sustainability leadership and accountability. A whole criteria set with no 5th Edition equivalent.
• F4.C Recognising and responding to abuse and violence.
• F10.A Governance of digital health technologies.
• F11.A and F11.B Safe and accountable use of AI, and evaluation and monitoring of AI use. The AI criteria apply if your practice uses AI tools such as AI scribes.
• F8.F Informing patients about digital communication tools (aspirational).

What has been expanded

Strategic planning (F1.B) builds on C3.1A and C3.1B, and operational planning (F1.C) on C3.1A to C3.1C. Governance risk management (F1.G) draws on C3.1C and C3.2D. Emergency and business continuity planning (F2.A) now combines C3.3A with the ICT disruption content of C6.4D. Information security has been split into finer criteria: ICT continuity and cyber security (F8.A), digital governance (F8.B), digital communications (F8.C) and social media (F8.D), all expanded from the C6.4 indicators.

What carries across largely intact

Team induction (F4.A from C3.2C), professional development discussions (F4.D from C3.2B), CPR certification (F4.E from C8.1B and GP3.1A), practitioner registration and GP qualifications (F5.A and F5.B from GP3.1A and GP3.1B), clinical autonomy (F6.A from C5.2A) and record retention (F8.E from C6.4E).

Practice manager takeaway: Foundations is where your gap analysis should start. It is mostly governance and documentation work, which is exactly the work that cannot be done in the last month before a visit.

Clinical governance

Clinical governance is the largest standard, at 40 criteria, and the most familiar. It draws together the 5th Edition's clinical indicators from Core Standards 5 to 7, the Quality Improvement module's clinical indicators, and most of the General Practice module.

What is new here

• CG4.C Sustainable clinical practice
• CG4.D Antimicrobial stewardship
• CG7.A Clinical risk management system. Incident management (CG7.B, expanded from QI3.1A and QI3.1B) is familiar; a system for managing clinical risk proactively is new.
• CG13.D Sharing deidentified patient information for research and secondary use

What has been expanded

The patient record criteria in CG3 deserve the closest reading. Demographic recording (CG3.A from C7.1A and C7.1B), clinical documentation (CG3.D), shared decision-making and care planning (CG3.G from QI2.2B), documentation of consent discussions (CG3.H from C1.3A, C1.3B and C2.1B) and recording patient communications (CG3.I) are all expanded.

CG3.E Coded health summaries and allergies consolidates four 5th Edition indicators (QI2.1A, QI2.1B, QI1.3A and C7.1G). Commentary on the new Standards points to a higher bar for allergy recording here than the 5th Edition's 90% of active records, so check the full wording against your current clinical software reports.

Also expanded: digital clinical information systems (CG1.A), referrals and coordination of care (CG5.A), results, recalls and reminders (CG6.A from GP2.2A to GP2.2D), managing cross-infection risks (CG9.C), the practice environment (CG10.A from GP5.1A to GP5.1F), and reprocessing reusable medical devices (CG9.E), which now has a criterion of its own where the 5th Edition embedded it within GP4.1A and infection prevention and control guidance.

What carries across largely intact

Infection control policy and coordinator (CG9.A, CG9.B), sterilisation traceability (CG9.F from GP4.1F), workforce immunisation (CG8.A from C3.5B), cold chain (CG12.A and CG12.B from GP6.1A to GP6.1D), clinical equipment and spirometry (CG11.A to CG11.C), medicines lists (CG3.F), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status (CG3.B) and research ethics and indemnity (CG13.A, CG13.B).

Practice manager takeaway: if your clinical systems were solid under the 5th Edition, most of this standard is a re-labelling exercise. Spend your effort on CG3, CG7.A and the two new clinical practice criteria in CG4.

Patient participation

Patient participation gathers the 5th Edition's patient-facing indicators from Core Standards 1, 2 and 4 and the access indicators from GP Standard 1.

What is new here

• PP4.A Informed consent for procedures and treatments. The 5th Edition covered consent for third-party presence (now PP4.B, retained from C2.2A); a dedicated criterion for consent to procedures and treatments is new.
• PP6.B Environmental information relevant to healthcare

What has been expanded

Ten of the 17 criteria are expanded. That makes this the standard most likely to catch out practices that assume old evidence is enough. They are practice information (PP1.A), communication with consumers (PP2.A), digital communication systems and social media (PP2.C, PP2.D), rights, diversity and cultural safety (PP3.A), complaints management (PP7.B), consumer engagement (PP8.A from QI1.2A to QI1.2C), triage (PP9.A), access to consultation types (PP9.B) and after-hours care (PP10.A).

Consumer engagement is the one to watch. Under the 5th Edition, a patient feedback survey usually covered QI1.2. PP8.A is framed around engagement and improvement, so expect to show what you did with the feedback, not only that you collected it.

What carries across largely intact

Emergency messaging (PP2.B), accessibility for people with disability (PP5.A), health promotion and preventive care (PP6.A) and open disclosure (PP7.A from QI3.2A).

Continuous quality improvement

The smallest standard has three criteria, and two of them are new.

• CQI1.A Practice-wide continuous quality improvement system expands QI1.1A to QI1.1D and QI1.3B. It is framed as a system across the whole practice, not a single activity at visit time.
• CQI1.B Monitoring environmental performance is new.
• CQI1.C Environmental impact measurement is new and aspirational.

Read together with F3, that makes five criteria about environmental sustainability, none with a 5th Edition equivalent, before you count sustainable clinical practice (CG4.C) and environmental information for patients (PP6.B). If you have never measured your practice's energy, waste or supply use, starting a simple baseline now gives you trend data by the time it matters.

Two things the comparison will not tell you

Some 5th Edition indicators feed more than one criterion. C6.4F (digital communications) maps to both F8.C and PP2.C. C6.4G (social media) maps to both F8.D and PP2.D. GP3.1A appears under both CPR certification and practitioner registration. One piece of 5th Edition evidence may need to be split, or extended, to satisfy two criteria assessed in different standards.

The mapping does not include the optional point of care testing standard. If you provide point-of-care testing, read that standard in full on its own.

How to run your gap analysis with the spreadsheet

The download has four tabs:

1. Instructions, with the RACGP's change categories and caveats
2. Summary, which counts New, Expanded and Retained criteria per standard and tracks your progress as you fill in the comparison
3. Crosswalk (the side-by-side tab), all 92 criteria in RACGP order with the related 5th Edition content, plus yellow columns for your current evidence, a status (Covered, Partial, Gap or Not applicable), an owner, a target date and notes
4. 5th Ed lookup, the reverse view, listing every 5th Edition indicator the mapping names and the 6th Edition criteria it now feeds

A workable order:

1. Start with the 19 New criteria. Filter the Change column to New. You will have little or no evidence for these, and several (governance framework, sustainability, AI) need decisions from the practice owners, not just paperwork.
2. Then the 39 Expanded criteria. For each one, list the 5th Edition evidence you hold, then read the full 6th Edition wording and mark it Partial unless you are confident it fully meets the new requirement.
3. Finish with the 34 Retained criteria. These are usually quick. They are still worth checking, because the RACGP is clear that retained criteria can contain new sub-criteria.
4. Give every Gap and Partial an owner and a date. A gap analysis without owners is just a list of worries.

If you have your last accreditation report to hand, the 5th Ed lookup tab is the fastest way in. Look up each indicator the assessor commented on and see where it lives now.

How Practice Managed helps

The criterion the 6th Edition gives most practices the least credit for is the one underneath everything else: F1.D, document control and version management.

Practice Managed's Manual is written to the RACGP Standards. Choose 5th edition, 6th edition or Moving to the 6th edition, and setup shows what either edition asks for. Every publish is a numbered, frozen version with full history. Every acknowledgement is recorded against the exact version and site. Training records, including CPR done outside the app, sit beside your policies, so evidence for criteria like F4.E builds up as your team does the work.

Download the side-by-side comparison, start on what you still need to do, and keep the evidence in one place as you go.

Practice Managed launches in early 2027. Join the early access list to be first to start your free 30-day trial. No credit card needed.

---

This post is general information for Australian practice managers. It is not a substitute for professional advice or the RACGP Standards themselves. Criterion codes, summaries and change categories are taken from the RACGP's Mapping of the Standards for general practices, 6th edition to 5th edition (RACGP, 2026). For the definitive text, visit the RACGP's 6th Edition hub.