The RACGP accreditation guide for practice managers: what to do now that the 6th Edition is out

If you are running a general practice in Australia, accreditation is the single biggest quality and compliance milestone in your calendar. It is also the one that generates the most stress, the most late nights, and the most Post-it notes stuck to the wall of the practice manager's office.

The RACGP released the 6th Edition of the Standards for general practices on 26 August 2026, so this is a particularly active moment. If you are new to accreditation, you need the foundation. If you have been through it before, you need to know what has changed and when it will start affecting you.

This guide covers both.

What accreditation actually is (and why it matters)

Accreditation is the formal process where an external assessor verifies that your practice meets the RACGP Standards for general practices. Passing accreditation lets your practice access the Practice Incentives Program, Workforce Incentive Program payments, and various state and federal funding streams. It also lets you register for teaching and training placements.

Without it, most Australian general practices cannot operate commercially at scale. So while the standards are voluntary in the strictest sense, the funding they unlock makes them effectively mandatory.

Accreditation runs on a three-year cycle. Every three years, an assessor from AGPAL, GPA or Quality Practice Accreditation (QPA) visits your practice, reviews your documentation and evidence, interviews staff, and confirms that you meet the criteria. In between assessments, you are expected to maintain continuous compliance, not scramble in the last quarter.

This last point matters more than most practice managers realise. A well-run compliance system is a rhythm, not a project. The practices that struggle are the ones that treat accreditation as something that starts three months out.

Where we sit right now

Two editions of the standards are relevant to your planning today.

The 5th Edition was released in October 2017 and is what your practice is still assessed against under the National General Practice Accreditation Scheme. Nothing changes for you today. If you have a survey booked in the next few months, it will be a 5th Edition assessment.

The 6th Edition was released on 26 August 2026. It is the future. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care will announce a transition timetable in due course. Once transition begins, practices will have a period where they can choose either edition, and after that the 6th Edition becomes compulsory for everyone.

If you are due for accreditation in the next 12 months, keep meeting the 5th Edition. If you are not due for another 18 to 36 months, you should start understanding what the 6th Edition asks of you now, because some of the changes are structural and cannot be sorted in a hurry.

The 5th Edition: the foundation you still need

The 5th Edition is built around three modules:

• Core module: eight standards covering the essentials of clinical safety and patient care
• Quality improvement module: three standards on measuring and improving the practice
• General practice module: six standards on how the practice operates day to day

Between them, they define the criteria your practice must meet across governance, patient rights, clinical care, physical environment, information management and workforce.

For practice managers, the 5th Edition sits across roughly seven working areas. If you are doing all of these well, you are on the right side of the standards:

1. Patient records: accurate, current, appropriately secured, with recall and reminder systems working
2. Clinical governance: clear roles, credentialing checks, incident reporting, complaint handling
3. Practice policies and procedures: up to date, accessible to staff, reviewed regularly
4. Physical environment: infection control, sterilisation, cold chain, waste management, equipment maintenance
5. Team management: position descriptions, induction, ongoing training, performance reviews, immunisation records
6. Emergency preparedness: response plans, medications and equipment ready, drill records
7. Continuous quality improvement: genuine QI activities, PDSA cycles documented, outcomes reviewed

None of that goes away in the 6th Edition. If you have a strong 5th Edition system, you have a strong foundation.

What is new in the 6th Edition

This is where practice managers need to pay attention, because the 6th Edition is not a rebadged 5th Edition. It restructures the whole framework and introduces six brand new areas that have no equivalent in your current evidence library.

The new structure

The three modules of the 5th Edition (Core, QI, General Practice) are gone. In their place, four core standards:

1. Foundations of general practice: the essential elements of setting up and operating the practice
2. Clinical governance: the systems for maintaining quality and safety of care
3. Patient participation: meaningful patient engagement to improve care quality
4. Continuous quality improvement: ongoing assessment and performance improvement

Plus one optional standard:

5. Point of care testing: required only if your practice provides PoCT

The four core standards contain 92 criteria: 89 required when applicable and three aspirational.

Fewer criteria does not mean less work. The six new areas below will be genuine gaps for most practices.

The six new requirement areas

These are the parts of the 6th Edition that your existing evidence will not cover, no matter how well organised you are today.

1. Planning and governance

The 6th Edition requires a documented mission, vision and values, strategic and operational planning, a process for reviewing and resolving ethical issues, and identification and management of governance risks. Under the 5th Edition, most practices operated on informal versions of these, if they existed at all. Now they must be documented and reviewed.

2. Environmental sustainability

The 6th Edition adds environmental sustainability criteria. Documenting how your practice approaches sustainability is expected. Measuring your overall environmental impact is one of the three aspirational criteria, but starting a simple record of energy, water, waste and clinical supplies now still puts you ahead.

3. Digital health technologies

Digital health now has its own criteria. You will need to show that your patient portal, secure messaging and telehealth setup meet them. The Standards still expect procedures for both digital and hard copy records.

4. Artificial intelligence

A dedicated criterion governs safe use of AI tools, but it applies only if your practice uses them. The standards do not require anyone to adopt AI. If you do use AI scribes, decision support tools or triage systems, you will need governance around them: informed consent, human oversight, data handling, and periodic review.

5. Continuous quality improvement (annual activity)

Quality improvement was already required under the 5th Edition. The 6th Edition sets an explicit minimum: at least one quality improvement activity every 12 months, with documented outcomes. Practices can no longer treat QI as a box to tick in the accreditation quarter.

6. Consumer engagement

The 6th Edition includes consumer expectation statements developed with patients, describing what they value and expect. Practices will need mechanisms for meaningful patient participation, not just patient feedback surveys.

Other changes to know about

Beyond the six new areas, many existing criteria have been expanded or reworded. The RACGP has published a mapping between the two editions that shows which criteria are new, expanded or retained. Use it to find your way around, then read the full wording of each criterion before relying on any summary, including this one.

What to do right now

Here is what a well-run practice should be doing between now and when the Commission publishes the transition timetable. The transition window will likely be 12 months long once it starts, but you cannot count on that, and several of these items take real time to embed.

This quarter (next 3 months)

1. Confirm your next accreditation date. If it is within 12 months, focus almost entirely on 5th Edition compliance. If it is 12 to 36 months out, you can split your effort.

2. Read the 6th Edition once, cover to cover. Give yourself two focused sessions. Do not try to make it stick on the first read. The purpose is orientation, not memorisation. The document is 181 pages.

3. Assign a 6th Edition lead. This is usually the practice manager, but not always. Whoever it is should own the transition planning from now until the assessment. Give them protected time, not the leftover Friday afternoon.

4. Start a gap analysis. For each new requirement area (planning and governance, sustainability, digital health, AI, annual CQI, consumer engagement), note what you have today, what is missing, and what it would take to close the gap. This is the single most valuable exercise you can do right now.

This half-year (next 6 months)

5. Draft your mission, vision, values, and strategic plan. These do not need to be MBA-grade documents. They do need to be genuine, discussed with your team, and reviewed on a schedule. Give yourself three drafts and a team workshop.

6. Audit your patient records. Are they truly digital only? Are demographics captured to the new expanded standard? Are 100% of active patients tagged with allergies or no known allergies? Are your medical codes using nationally recognised vocabulary? Each of these is a project on its own.

7. Inventory your AI tools. If your GPs use AI scribes, transcription tools, decision support, or automated triage, list them. Note who owns each one, what data goes through it, what patient consent looks like, and how it is reviewed. If nothing exists, decide now whether to write a policy or restrict use until you can govern it properly.

8. Set up your annual CQI activity. Pick one meaningful problem in your practice. Design a proper PDSA cycle. Assign owners, timelines, and evidence-collection points. Document as you go. This becomes your evidence for the CQI standard when assessment day arrives.

This year (next 12 months)

9. Build your sustainability baseline. Start measuring energy, water, clinical waste, and supply consumption. Even rough figures beat nothing. You will need trend data to demonstrate improvement in future cycles.

10. Build your consumer engagement mechanism. This is more than a feedback form on the desk. Think about a patient advisory panel, structured feedback loops, or co-designed processes.

11. Refresh your document control system. The 6th Edition places substantially more emphasis on how policies and procedures are managed, reviewed, and version-controlled. If your policies live on a shared drive that nobody has opened in two years, this needs to change.

12. Map your evidence. For every new criterion, note where the evidence will come from. Do not assume you can reconstruct it later. Assessors cannot credit undocumented compliance, even when the practice is genuinely doing the right thing.

Common mistakes to avoid

Six things practice managers run into again and again when preparing for accreditation.

Treating the assessment as the goal. The assessment is the checkpoint. The goal is a well-run, safe, quality practice. If you build systems that only exist to pass an audit, the audit will be exhausting and the practice will still be a mess afterwards.

Leaving evidence collection to the last three months. This is the single biggest cause of accreditation panic. The 6th Edition's annual CQI activity requirement makes this approach impossible. You cannot reconstruct a year's worth of PDSA cycles the week before the survey.

Treating the transition as purely a documentation exercise. The new digital health and AI criteria are not only policy problems. They are practice-wide changes requiring software configuration, workflow adjustment, and staff training. Budget the time accordingly.

Assuming existing evidence will transfer. The 6th Edition restructures the standards. A policy or procedure that sat comfortably in the Core module of the 5th Edition may now be assessed under Clinical Governance or Patient Participation in the 6th. Dual-map your evidence early.

Doing it all yourself. Practice managers are the natural owners of accreditation, but not the only workers. Get GPs, nurses, reception and admin involved. Assign owners. Delegate. If the entire accreditation lives in your head, the practice is one resignation away from crisis.

Ignoring the transition timing. The Commission has not yet announced when the transition begins. Do not wait for that announcement to start preparing. The gap analysis and evidence-mapping work is edition-neutral and useful either way.

How Practice Managed helps

Practice Managed was built specifically for the operational side of accreditation. If you are struggling with any of the following, we can help:

• Keeping policies and procedures current, versioned, and actually read by staff
• Tracking training completion, competency, and re-attestation across a growing team
• Maintaining registers (cold chain, incidents, complaints, equipment servicing) without spreadsheets scattered across shared drives
• Keeping your team's registration, indemnity and CPR records in one place
• Counting down to your visit, with where each piece of evidence is kept

Practice Managed opens for sign-up soon. Join the early access list to be first to start your free 30-day trial. No credit card needed.

Final thought

Accreditation is not going anywhere. If anything, the 6th Edition raises the bar. But the practices that do well share one habit: they treat compliance as a rhythm, not a project. They know what evidence they have, they know what evidence they need, and they build the systems that produce evidence automatically as a byproduct of doing good work.

The 6th Edition is a good excuse to reset those habits. Start now, work steadily, and by the time transition begins, you will already be most of the way there.

---

This guide is general information for Australian practice managers. It is not a substitute for professional advice or the RACGP Standards themselves. For the definitive text, visit the RACGP's 6th Edition hub.