Who can use the titles 'Dr', 'Specialist', and 'Surgeon'?
AHPRA restricts 'specialist' and 'surgeon' to specific registrations, and 'Dr' has its own rule. What health practice websites can and cannot claim.
A title on a health practice website is a claim about registration, and the National Law treats it as one. “Specialist”, “surgeon”, and “Dr” each carry a rule, and each rule catches a different everyday phrasing that practices use without realising it is regulated. Getting a title wrong is not a matter of taste; using a protected title you do not hold is a criminal offence under the National Law, separate from the advertising rules in section 133.
Here is who can use what.
”Specialist” means specialist registration, and nothing looser
AHPRA’s advertising guidance is direct: words like “specialist”, “specialises in”, “specialty”, and “specialised” imply that the practitioner holds specialist registration. If the practitioner does not hold that registration, the words are likely to mislead the public, and misleading advertising breaches section 133.
Specialist registration is a formal category. It exists in medicine and dentistry and a handful of other professions where the Board has approved specialties, and a practitioner earns it through recognised advanced training. It is not a synonym for “experienced”, and it is not something a practitioner confers on themselves by focusing their practice.
That catches a common line on service pages. A general practitioner who writes “specialist in skin cancer”, or a psychologist who writes “our specialists in trauma”, is making a registration claim they cannot back unless they actually hold specialist registration in that field. In psychology in particular there is no specialist registration at all, so “specialist” on a psychologist’s site is misleading by definition.
The fix is to describe the practice honestly without borrowing the registration word. AHPRA notes that phrases such as “substantial experience in” or “working primarily in” are less likely to mislead, because they describe what the practitioner does rather than a status they hold. “Substantial experience in treating skin cancer” says the same useful thing to a patient and makes no false claim.
”Surgeon” is now a protected title in its own right
Until recently, “surgeon” was only protected when it was tied to an approved specialty, which let practitioners in unapproved areas market themselves as a “cosmetic surgeon” regardless of their training. That changed. Under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law (Surgeons) Amendment, which commenced on 20 September 2023 and has since been adopted across the states and territories including Western Australia, “surgeon” is a protected title.
Only medical practitioners holding specialist registration in surgery, in obstetrics and gynaecology, or in ophthalmology may use the title “surgeon”. A doctor with general registration, or with specialist registration in a different field such as general practice or dermatology, cannot call themselves a surgeon, and that includes the compound “cosmetic surgeon”. AHPRA expects references to “surgeon” that do not meet the new rule to be removed from advertising, websites included, and a practitioner who keeps using the title after a warning can face criminal prosecution.
If your site describes a practitioner as a surgeon, the question is not whether they perform procedures; it is whether they hold specialist registration in one of those three fields. If they do not, the word comes off.
”Dr” is allowed more widely, but the profession has to be clear
“Dr” is the title practices most often worry about unnecessarily. It is a courtesy title, not a protected one, so a practitioner who is not a medical practitioner can use it. Dentists, and holders of a doctoral degree, use “Dr” legitimately.
The catch is the advertising rule that sits underneath it. If using “Dr” could lead a patient to believe the practitioner is a medical practitioner when they are not, the usage becomes misleading. AHPRA’s guidance is that the practitioner’s profession should be made clear alongside the title. A chiropractor, osteopath, or physiotherapist using “Dr” should present it as “Dr Sarah Lee (Chiropractor)” or the equivalent, so a reader is not left to assume a medical qualification. A bare “Dr Sarah Lee” on a physiotherapy site, with nothing to signal the profession, is the version that risks a breach.
This is a labelling rule, not a prohibition. The title can stay; the profession has to travel with it.
The other rule the title claims trip over
Titles rarely breach on their own. They tend to appear next to the claim they inflate: a “specialist” heading over a list of conditions the practice claims to treat, or a “Dr” next to an outcome a patient supposedly achieved. The title rules sit inside the wider set of advertising prohibitions in section 133, which also cover misleading claims, testimonials, offers made without their terms, and language that creates an unreasonable expectation of benefit. A page that overstates a title is often overstating other things too.
Checking your own titles
Walk your team page, your service pages, and your booking system, and for every practitioner ask three questions. Does any use of “specialist” or its variants match an actual specialist registration? Does any use of “surgeon” match specialist registration in surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, or ophthalmology? Does every non-medical “Dr” carry the profession alongside it? Booking systems and third-party directory listings are the places these slip through, because they are often set up once and never re-read.
We built a free tool that runs this check for you. Submit your practice website and it reviews up to five pages against the advertising guidelines, flags titles that may not match the registration they imply, quotes the exact wording, cites the relevant section, and emails you the report. It is general information rather than legal advice, and a clean result is not a compliance guarantee; for advice on your obligations, your professional indemnity insurer or a lawyer is the right door. Check your website here.
Titles are one part of the picture; the full set of prohibitions is covered in what AHPRA’s advertising rules mean for your website. This is the same discipline behind the confidential AI work we do for professional services practices. If your practice is weighing up AI more broadly, start with a conversation.