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You can review a therapist you’ve seen. What a review may say is constrained by Australian law, not by Open Therapy’s preference.

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Why the rules exist

Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law prohibits using testimonials to advertise a regulated health service. Writing whatever you like about a practitioner on your own social media is your business. A review that Open Therapy chooses to publish on a therapist’s profile is our advertising, and it has to comply. The line: you can describe the service, but not the treatment.

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What you can write about

Yes

  • Booking, waiting times, availability, punctuality, cancellations
  • Admin — invoices, fees, rebates, Medicare, NDIS, paperwork, reports
  • The premises, parking, accessibility, video quality
  • Their manner and how they communicated
  • Languages, appointment times, location

No

  • Any symptom, condition, diagnosis, or your reason for attending
  • Any treatment, technique, medication, assessment or test result
  • Any statement about outcome, progress or whether it helped — including negative ones
  • Any clinical recommendation
  • Any claim about their clinical skill
Implication counts. “I can finally sleep through the night” is a clinical outcome even though it names no diagnosis, and “she really helped me with my anxiety” names both a condition and an outcome. Neither can be published.
A publishable review that still says something useful: “Easy to book, ran on time every week, and the invoices came through the same day so my Medicare claims were straightforward. The rooms are up one flight of stairs with no lift.”

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Writing one

A rating from 1 to 5 and up to 2,000 characters. You can leave one review per therapist — editing replaces what you wrote rather than adding a second.

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What happens next

Every review is screened before it appears. There are three outcomes.
“Thanks — your review is live on the profile.” You’ll get an email confirming it.
“We can’t publish this one. Australian advertising rules stop us showing reviews that mention symptoms, treatment or whether therapy helped. A note about booking, admin or how you were treated is fine.”The email tells you the specific reason — for example, “Describes an improvement in how you’ve been feeling, which counts as a clinical outcome.” You can rewrite and resubmit.
“Thanks — your review is with our team and will appear once it’s been read.”Anything unclear goes to a person rather than being published or rejected automatically. There’s no email for this one, because “we’re still reading it” isn’t news.
Screening errs firmly towards not publishing. A review waiting in a queue costs one person a day. A wrongly published one is an offence under the National Law.

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Complaints aren’t reviews

A review isn’t the channel for a concern about someone’s conduct or clinical care — and by law it can’t describe the clinical part anyway. Write to governance@opentherapy.app, which is acknowledged the same business day, or raise it with Ahpra directly. See Safety and privacy.

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Can a therapist remove a review?

No. Therapists have no moderation, reply or takedown control over reviews on their profile. Screening is Open Therapy’s responsibility, applied the same way for everyone.