Free Security Awareness Training for Clinic Staff (With CPD Points)

Most security awareness training pitched at medical practices is either expensive, generic, or both. This one is neither. It's free, it was built specifically for Australian healthcare, and it comes with something practice managers actually need: real CPD points.

The course is called Digital Health Security Awareness, and it's run by the Australian Digital Health Agency — the same body behind My Health Record — on their own training platform at training.digitalhealth.gov.au.

What the course covers

It's five short, self-paced modules, each accessible on its own so staff can complete them between patients rather than needing a dedicated hour:

1. Introduction to security awareness (~15 min) — the staff member's role in protecting the confidentiality of health information.
2. Think before you click! (~25 min) — safe online practices and how to spot the threats aimed at healthcare specifically.
3. Passwords (~15 min) — why a strong password is still the single biggest lever staff control.
4. Network and device security (~25 min) — the everyday habits that keep clinic networks and devices safe.
5. Respond. Report. Protect privacy. (~25 min) — what to do when something goes wrong, including data breach reporting obligations.

All up, it's about an hour and forty-five minutes for the full course — realistically spread across a week of quiet moments, not a training day.

Why it's worth doing properly

Each module ends with a short quiz (75% to pass, two attempts per question), and completing all five earns a downloadable, emailable certificate of participation.

That certificate is doing more work than it looks like. The course is accredited by the AAPM (Australian Association of Practice Managers) for 5 CPD points — so your practice manager isn't just ticking a training box, they're banking professional development points for something they'd have to do anyway.

It also happens to be exactly the kind of evidence we wrote about recently: under the My Health Records Rules 2026, practices need to be able to produce staff training records on request, not just a policy that says training happens. A dated completion certificate from an AAPM-accredited government course is about as clean as that evidence gets.

How to get your team enrolled

1. Go to training.digitalhealth.gov.au/course/view.php?id=75.
2. Create a free account if you don't already have one on the platform.
3. Enrol and work through the five modules at your own pace.
4. Download the certificate once all five are complete, and keep a copy.

Once everyone's done

Don't let the certificates sit in five different inboxes. Add the completion date to whatever staff training record your practice keeps — even a simple spreadsheet with name, course, and date is enough to answer an audit request. If your practice doesn't have that register yet, that's a five-minute fix, and one we're happy to help with as part of a broader compliance gap assessment.

It's rare to find something that's free, genuinely well-made, directly relevant to your clinic, and worth CPD points all at once. This one is. Get it in front of your team.