On 26 August 2026, the RACGP released the 6th edition of the Standards for General Practices, its first update since the 5th edition landed in October 2017, and the biggest rewrite in the thirty years since the framework began. Inside Foundations, next to information security and confidentiality, sits a criterion that has never existed in any of the editions before it: F11, artificial intelligence. 

What F11 requires 

F11 doesn’t ask whether your practice should use AI. It applies the moment you do, in full, with no lighter version for practices that adopted the technology early because it worked. Documented patient consent before an AI scribe listens to a consultation. A clinician checking and signing off every AI-generated note before it reaches the record. A governance process that can show, on the day your surveyor asks, what happens when the tool gets something wrong. 

F9 got sharper too 

Sitting one line above F11 is F9, confidentiality and privacy of health information. In the 5th edition it lived under two indicators, C6.3 and C6.4. In the 6th, it has been expanded and broadened to cover patient information the moment it moves through a digital health tool, not just what sits on paper or inside your clinical software. F10, digital health technologies, ties the privacy criterion directly to every patient portal, online booking system and AI tool the practice runs. 

What this means before your next survey 

For a practice already running an AI scribe, a patient portal, or online booking, this is the checklist your accreditation surveyor now carries into the room. Three questions decide how that conversation goes: who signed off on every AI tool in use, where the consent records for those tools are kept, and who owns the privacy risk assessment for each system touching patient data. 

If you own the practice, F11 changes what you’re personally accountable for at your next accreditation review. If you manage it day to day, F11 changes what needs to already be on file before the surveyor walks in: consent logs, sign-off records, a risk assessment with a date on it. 

Those are clinical governance questions before they are IT questions. They can’t sit with a general IT provider who has never opened a patient management system, because the answer depends on knowing the difference between a consent form and the Consent Form field inside your clinical software. 

Talk to us before your next survey, not during it.