Month: October 2025

Employment opportunity | Executive Assistant, part-time Monday – Friday

Posted on October 27, 2025

We are growing our small but mighty team who are making sure health consumer and patient voices are at the heart of our health system.

Executive Assistant, part-time, fixed term (to December 2026 with the possibility of extension)

We are seeking a highly organised Executive Assistant who loves people and being in a fast paced environment with lots of variety. This is a pivotal role in an agile and growing organisation and will play a key part in streamlining our Executive’s operations.

  • Hours: 25 hours/week to be worked across Monday – Friday, 10am – 3.30pm
  • Pay: L3 on the Social, Community, Health and Disability Award – $38.65/hour plus super at 12%

The role offers:

  • A high degree of variety – working with the Executive Director on a wide range of activities and liaising with diverse community members and staff at all levels in the health and social care system
  • The opportunity to be part of a consumer-first organisation with a focus on improving health equity and championing health rights
  • A welcoming and inclusive workplace where everyone is encouraged to bring all of themselves to work
  • The opportunity to implement and streamline administrative processes to help us make the most of the limited funding we receive
  • A competitive not-for-profit annual base salary with salary packaging

About you:

  • You’re highly organised, have strong administration skills, and excellent attention to detail
  • You’re looking for a role where you can apply your executive assistance, organisational and administration skills to do work that you care about
  • You’re interested in the health system and care about people’s experiences of it
  • You’re happy to muck in and enjoy working on a range of different projects and with different teams simultaneously

Position overview

This position provides expert level administrative and organisational support to the Executive Director. This includes diary and travel management, meeting administration, general office administration, and covering reception. We’re looking for someone who is highly organised and who will work proactively to help us be as efficient and effective as we can be.

A typical week might see you doing a range of tasks:

  • Coordinating the Executive Director’s busy diary in liaison with senior stakeholders
  • Organising the Executive Director’s email inbox ensuring that priority emails are identified and actioned
  • Following up on actions as directed by the Executive Director and senior staff
  • Assisting with planning and delivering a range of events, workshops and activities by organising attendee lists, logistics and catering and consumer payments and enquiries
  • Attending workshops and events when required to – this may include occasional after hours working
  • Greeting visitors to our offices, responding to our reception phone calls, and responding to emails through our main inbox
  • Managing the training room and equipment register
  • Monitoring and updating organisational policies, procedures and registers
  • Scheduling meetings, preparing agendas and recording minutes
  • Managing stakeholder contact details through our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
  • General office admin including organising travel and accommodation
  • Generating simple reports and analysis from existing systems including data entry
  • Providing executive support to the Executive Director, including managing diary requests

Click here to read the job description for a full outline of responsibilities for the role.

Selection criteria

Essential

  1. A minimum of 2 years’ experience in a similar Executive Assistant role
  2. Well-developed interpersonal and verbal skills, with a demonstrated understanding of the sensitivity and empathy needed when communicating with vulnerable community members and senior stakeholders
  3. Well-developed written communication skills, with the ability to write clearly and concisely for internal and external use
  4. Excellent organisational skills, with high attention to detail and the ability to manage and prioritise deadlines and own workload with limited supervision
  5. Demonstrated ability to use initiative and solve problems within own area of responsibility
  6. Be adept, or be able to quickly become adept in, a range of office software programs including Microsoft Office 365 Suite, project management software, and accounting software

Desirable

  1. A demonstrated interest in the aims and purpose of HCC, for example, experience as a health consumer representative or volunteering in a similar advocacy organisation
  2. Experience working in community services and not for profit sector
  3. Ability to develop and maintain productive relationships with diverse internal and external stakeholders, and navigate difficult conversations when required

 

To apply for the position

Read the job description and send a cover letter of no more than two pages addressing the selection criteria, along with a current resume outlining your work experience, skills and any relevant education or training to jobs@hconc.org.au.

Please submit your application no later than 8am on Monday 10 November. 

However, note that applications will be considered as received and we reserve the right to progress recruitment before the closing date – so get your application in early.

Applications that do not address the criteria may not be considered.

If you require any adjustments to submit your application or wish to have a confidential discussion about the role, please contact Clare Mullen, Executive Director on (08) 9221 3422

 

Joint AHPRA and ATO Statement Targets Predatory Dental Payment Practices

Posted on October 26, 2025

We’ve seen time and again that consumers speaking up can drive change, and last week was no exception. Consumers who have been impacted by poor practices by WA dentists have collaborated with HCC and together we are we are making changes.  

We celebrated a victory last week when APHRA and the ATO issued a very strong joint statement on the worrying misuse and overuse of the compassionate release of superannuation to pay for dental treatment. The agencies gave strong guidance to practitioners on the limited circumstances in which it is appropriate to use such payment methods and also undertook to investigate practitioners who they believe are using this system inappropriately. 

Unlike previous statements on this topic, which were framed as partly a caution to patients, this statement places the responsibility squarely with practitioners and with third party agents who may assist in completing applications for early release of super. We welcome this change in approach, and we are really pleased that these regulators have listened to consumers and to our advocacy in framing this message. 

We heard about this issue earlier this year, following the death of a dental practitioner who had taken substantial advance payments from patients for expensive dental treatment, but had passed away before delivering the treatment.  

In our research, we found a worrying number of practitioners who include in their advertising materials information that encourages people to withdraw their superannuation to pay for treatment. Some of this advertising appeared predatory and was often included incorrect information.  

After advocacy from us, in partnership with consumers and pressure from the media, there was a press release from AHPRA in late May which expressed concern about the increase in using superannuation to pay for treatment, and a great checklist of red flags for consumers. This was a pleasing start, but we continued our advocacy, as we were concerned that the messaging from regulatory bodies around this practice was not strong enough.  

The statement issued on 16 October is strong. It speaks of inaccurate statements being made by practitioners on forms supporting the release of superannuation, and of the penalties that people will face for making such statements. The consumers who have been left stranded are continuing their fight for justice through legal avenues, the media, and complaints processes. We are continuing to work with Consumer Protection, AHPRA and Choice Australia to explore avenues to protect consumers in future.   

Bronwyn Ife  |  Systemic Advocacy and Engagement Lead

Media enquiries: 0488 701 839 | info@hconc.org.au

Dental issues, quality and cost – update on advocacy Oct 2025

Posted on October 1, 2025

This year many of us have been shocked by news reports of consumers having paid up front for extensive and costly dental treatment (often implants) and then before the work is completed their practitioner has stopped practicing, died or been deregistered, leaving consumers out of pocket, in pain and with nowhere to turn.

Making this more devastating, a number of consumers have withdrawn a substantial sum of money from their superannuation to afford the up-front cost for treatment. With the treatment being left unfinished they are left high and dry, and out of pocket.

What we heard

When these issues came to our attention – raised by consumers directly to our individual advocacy service, and through the media coverage in The Sunday Times – we looked into what had gone wrong and we found:

  • High costs of dental treatment meaning people need to request access to their Super to help cover the cost
  • Practitioners requiring payment upfront but those payments not always being protected or returned to consumers if practitioners are unable to complete the work
  • The system that’s supposed to protect consumers having a number of gaps:
    • Predatory advertising of costly dental treatment and encouragement to access Super without financial advice being promoted via social media with highly emotive imagery
    • Limitations of information being provided to consumers to enable them to make truly informed consent and being clear about the future impact of accessing Super to pay for treatment
    • The request for Compassionate Release of Super being signed off by the same health practitioner who will be benefit financially from that request. In many cases, this may not be a cause for concern. However, it allows for unscrupulous practitioners to encourage the transfer of funds from  someone’s future financial security, to their own income with little/few checks and balances to ensure fully informed consent.
  • Quality issues – people paying for expensive treatment and then learning their treatment was not of the expected standard
  • Practitioners with a history of concerning practice being able to continue to practice – and information not being available to consumers about past history

What we’ve done so far

It’s clear that the regulation and protection of consumer rights in the area of dental treatment is ripe for reform. Some of the gaps in protection for consumers will take a long time to resolve.

Having collected information about people’s experiences and identified the gaps in consumer protection, we’ve reached out to a number of the agencies that can play a role in addressing these. These include:

  • The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the Australian Dental Board
  • The WA Chief Dental Officer
  • The WA branch of the Australian Dental Association
  • The WA Commissioner for Consumer Protection
  • CHOICE, the national consumer advocacy group

We also reached out through our networks to find out about other consumer concerns on this area. Using that feedback, we’ve contributed to a number of media articles and raised consumer concerns regularly and consistently, as well as speaking up on consumer perspectives at this year’s Dental Board conference. We are making these points:

  • people making the decision to access Super to pay for dental treatment need to be provided with clear information about what they are paying – $10,000 today may actually be worth a lot more if it had been left to accumulate interest in your Super fund
  • if someone is paying up front for treatment, those funds should be held in a trust account – similar to when you pay a deposit for a rental property – that can’t be accessed by the health professional until the work has been completed
  • that regulators – like Ahpra – need to put the interests of consumers front and centre when designing and applying systems of regulation. And acknowledge that financial harm is a risk to consumers, and that regulation systems need to protect against that alongside health harm.

About compassionate release of super

The early release of superannuation – known as Compassionate Release of Super – is meant to only be used if other funding options such as savings or a loan are not available. It’s a last resort mechanism that’s in place to enable people to pay for  essential treatment that cannot be paid for any other way to:

  • treat a life-threatening illness or injury
  • alleviate acute or chronic pain
  • alleviate acute or chronic mental illness.

We are not arguing that the ability to access superannuation for compassionate reasons should cease. We are calling for some tighter checks and scrutiny to ensure that the release is only available when the treatment does meet the above criteria. And that consumers understand the full implications of accessing their funds this way.

The data that the Australian Tax Office provides is alarming.  A majority of superannuation released for compassionate grounds is being spent on medical care, with $1 billion released for medical treatment in 2023-24.

The largest category for medical release of superannuation is dentistry, with $526 million of the above $1 billion being released to pay for dental treatment. This has increased from $66 million in 2018-19, a nearly 700% increase in six years.

Many practices include references to accessing superannuation on their websites when they are referring to payment options. Some others mention accessing superannuation on the front page of their website and some even include it in their online advertising that is pushed as sponsored posts on social media and other websites. We have also seen the emergence of businesses who can complete your superannuation paperwork for you and help you access your super. These are not medical practices but rather an agency who charges patients to help them complete a fairly simple form, and can refer people to their “partner” practitioners if they are having a hard time getting a dentist to sign off on the release of superannuation.

We hope that the ATO can use their data to identify and track practitioners who are the recipients of a larger than usual proportion of superannuation releases and take appropriate actions to ensure that any unusual charging practices are closely scrutinised.

If you have concerns about the financial practices of a health practitioner, you can submit a notification to Ahpra at https://www.ahpra.gov.au/Notifications/Concerned-about-a-health-practitioner.aspx

Registration of practitioners who have a history of disciplinary issues

It became clear that one of the practitioners who had attracted media attention had previously been deregistered in another country. We have raised this with AHPRA as it was unclear to us how this practitioner came to be registered in Australia. While we were unable to obtain specific detail about an individual dentist we did have extensive discussions on this topic and are hopeful that AHPRA will in the future be approaching such registrations in a different way.

Where to next?

Sadly, many of the patients who have been left out of pocket with unfinished work by David Hurst are still stranded. We are aware that a class action has commenced and we hope that this process is helpful for those consumers.

We will be continuing our advocacy with the agencies outlined above to advocate for long-term systemic change. We will continue to share updates through our e-news.

If you have any comments on any of this, please reach out to us at info@hconc.org.au

 

 

Dental costs in WA. Consumer FAQ

Updated October 2025. Health Consumers’ Council WA.

Why are we talking about dental costs

Some people in WA paid large sums upfront for dental work. When a dentist stopped practising or was deregistered, the work was left unfinished. Patients lost money and often had health impacts.

Why do people use their superannuation for dental

Dental care is expensive. Many cannot afford it. Some dentists and third party services promote using superannuation as a payment option.

What is the risk

  • If treatment is not finished, your money may be lost.
  • Upfront payments are rarely protected.
  • Some dentists continue working despite past problems.
  • Advertising can be misleading about cost and outcomes.

How much superannuation is being used

In 2023 to 2024 Australians accessed 1 billion dollars through compassionate release of superannuation. Dentistry accounted for 526 million dollars, up from 66 million dollars in 2018 to 2019.

What should I do if I am considering dental work

  • Ask for a written cost estimate with item codes and timeframes.
  • Avoid paying the full cost upfront. Request staged payments.
  • Check the dentist’s registration on AHPRA and the Dental Board.
  • Be cautious of advertising that pushes superannuation access.
  • Contact HCCWA if you are unsure of your rights.

What is HCCWA doing

  • Collecting consumer stories and evidence.
  • Raising issues with AHPRA, the Dental Board, WA Chief Dental Officer, ADA WA, and Consumer Protection WA.
  • Partnering with consumer groups.
  • Pushing for protection of upfront payments and clearer disclosures.

Need advice

Contact Health Consumers’ Council WA. Visit hconc.org.au or call 08 9221 3422.