What the RACGP Standards ask of your building
Accreditation is mostly about how you run a practice. A handful of it’s about the rooms, and that handful is expensive to retrofit.
The short answer
You can be non-compliant in a beautiful clinic. It happens regularly, and it happens because the fitout was designed as an interiors project and accreditation was treated as paperwork that arrives later.
Key points
- Most of the Standards govern process. A minority govern the building, and those are the expensive ones.
- Visual and acoustic privacy in consulting and examination rooms is the requirement most often missed.
- Hand hygiene facilities belong where clinical care happens, not down the corridor.
- Design for them at concept. Retrofitting a built practice before an accreditation visit costs many times more.
You can be non-compliant in a beautiful clinic. It happens regularly, and it happens because the fitout was designed as an interiors project and accreditation was treated as paperwork that arrives later.
Most of the RACGP Standards are about how a practice operates: consent, recall systems, clinical governance, staff training. Nothing a builder can help with. But a minority of them describe the physical practice, and those are the ones that are cheap to design in and painful to add afterwards.
Privacy in consulting and examination rooms
This is the one that catches practices out most often, and it has two parts.
Visual privacy is straightforward. A patient being examined should not be visible from a corridor or a waiting area when the door opens. That means thinking about which way the door swings, where the examination couch sits relative to it, and whether a curtain track is needed.
Acoustic privacy is the expensive one. A conversation in one consulting room should not be audible in the next, and a plasterboard partition stopped at the ceiling grid does not achieve that. Walls need to run full height to the slab, with insulation in the cavity and attention to the places sound actually gets through: door seals, the gap under the door, and any service penetration that goes straight through the wall.
Adding acoustic performance to a finished practice means opening ceilings and rebuilding walls. Doing it at frame stage costs almost nothing.
The other document doing real work on a general practice fitout is AS 1428.1, which governs the path of travel from the street to the consulting room. Count your closet pans early as well, because more than one in a bank usually triggers an ambulant cubicle in each block.
Hand hygiene where care happens
Facilities for hand hygiene need to be available where clinical care is delivered. In practice that means a basin in the consulting room, not a basin at the end of the corridor.
Which sounds trivial until you count them. Six consulting rooms is six wet points, each needing water and waste, and on a suspended slab each one needs a route down through the tenancy below. This is one of the reasons a medical fitout costs more per square metre than an office fitout on an identical floor plan.
Storage for medicines and records
Secure, and appropriate to what is being stored. Vaccine refrigeration has its own requirements around temperature monitoring and power supply. Records, whether paper or the server that holds the electronic ones, need to be secured against both access and the more mundane risks of water and heat.
The design consequence is that the store isn’t a leftover cupboard at the end of the plan. It gets located, sized and serviced like any other room.
Treatment space appropriate to what you do
A practice performing minor procedures needs a treatment room that suits them: enough space to work around a patient, appropriate lighting, surfaces that clean properly, and somewhere for instruments to go before and after.
If you reprocess instruments on site, the reprocessing standards apply and the room has to be laid out for a one-way flow. That layout is a subject of its own.
The other documents in the room
The Standards don’t sit alone. A compliant practice also has to satisfy accessible access under AS 1428.1, ventilation under AS 1668.2, and its classification under the National Construction Code. Those are building requirements rather than accreditation ones, but they land on the same drawings.
The practical advice
Have the Standards open during concept design, not during your first accreditation cycle. Every requirement above is a line on a drawing when it is early and a variation when it’s not.
What building to these requirements costs is covered in the medical fitout cost guide.
Sources and further reading
The RACGP Standards are the authoritative document here and they’re freely available. Read them alongside your concept plan, not after it.
Standards for general practices, 5th edition. The physical-practice requirements behind general practice accreditation.
Room-by-room design guidance and standard components used across Australian health projects, including consulting, treatment and sterilising rooms.
Source for AS/NZS 4815 and 4187 reprocessing, AS 1428.1 access and AS 1668.2 ventilation. The standards themselves are purchased, not free.
The National Construction Code: building classification, fire separation, egress, sanitary provisions and access.
Questions
What do the RACGP Standards require of a practice building?
Consultation and examination rooms with visual and acoustic privacy, hand hygiene facilities where clinical care is delivered, secure and appropriate storage for medicines and records, and treatment space suited to the procedures performed.
Do consulting room walls need to go to the slab?
For acoustic privacy, generally yes. A partition stopped at the ceiling grid lets conversation carry over the top into the next room. Full-height walls with cavity insulation and sealed doors are the reliable way to achieve it, and they are cheap at frame stage.
Does every consulting room need a basin?
Hand hygiene facilities need to be available where clinical care is delivered, which in practice means a basin in the room not one shared down the corridor. It’s a significant part of why medical fitouts cost more per square metre than office fitouts.
Can an existing practice be brought up to the Standards?
Usually, but acoustic separation and hand hygiene points are the two that involve real building work instead of a policy change. Both are much cheaper to design in than to retrofit.
Send us the floor plan
A site assessment tells you what the tenancy can take and what it will cost to get there, ideally before you have signed for it.