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Usually not, and the Board says so in the standard itself: not all applicants with a criminal history are refused registration 1. It weighs twelve factors — the nature of the offence and its relevance to practice, gravity, time elapsed, sentence, your age, conduct since, future risk to patients 1. Declare everything, including spent convictions 1.
Start with what "criminal history" means. The Medical Board's criminal history registration standard, in force from 15 July 2026, uses the National Law definition: every conviction, every plea of guilty or finding of guilt whether or not a conviction was recorded, and every charge 1. A check under the National Law covers your whole criminal history regardless of age, from Australia and any other country, "including any spent or aged convictions" 1. That is wider than what a standard police check shows, and it is why people get caught out.
The test. You must not have a criminal history the Board considers inconsistent with suitability to hold registration 1. Deciding that, the Board runs through twelve numbered factors, expressly not in priority order: nature of the offence and its relevance to health practice; gravity; time elapsed; whether it was a conviction, a finding of guilt, a pending charge or a non-conviction charge (in that descending order of impact); the sentence; your age at the time, with offending under 18 generally weighing less; whether the conduct has since been decriminalised; your behaviour since; likelihood of future threat to a patient; experiences of racism and inequity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples; anything you tell them; and any other relevant matter 1.
Outcomes are not binary. The Board can refuse registration or renewal, impose conditions such as supervision or restricted practice, require an assessment, or take no action at all 1. It will not force you to give information that prejudices a pending charge, and must not draw an adverse inference from that 1.
The declaration is the part you control. You must tell Ahpra within seven days if you are charged with an offence punishable by 12 months' imprisonment or more, or convicted of or found guilty of any offence punishable by imprisonment 2. Not telling them is not itself an offence, but it is behaviour for which conduct action can be taken — and you are asked again at renewal 2. The sub's advice is unanimous and correct: declare it, and ring your MDO before you write the response 34. This is a description of the standard, not legal advice, and nobody here can predict your outcome.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Declare or beware. Better be upfront and disclose it. Because if you happen to be the random person they audit and run your criminal history check and discover it, and you did not declare it, this will bring into question your ethics and integrity, which can be more problematic.
Call your MDO mate - you pay them money for a reason.
Not saying I condone it, but if every one of my colleagues got deregistered after driving impaired, the hospitals would be quite short staffed.
They did not report that initial failed drug test to AHPRA
Asked 13 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /criminal (record|history)|conviction|police check|drink driving|\bDUI\b/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the disclosure threads that speak to the process rather than to a named individual's case; comments about specific reported offenders were excluded deliberately. Medical Board and Ahpra pages are recorded under source kind 'college' as the nearest profession-level official bucket in the schema.