A notice caught my eye calling for general practitioners to sit on the BreastScreen Queensland State Accreditation Committee. The BreastScreen program is the national mammogram screening program and is available to all Australian women between the ages of fifty and seventy (or younger in some circumstances) and screens around 1,600,000 women every year. In 2004, the BreastScreen program identified 3,851 invasive breast tumours. It’s an important program. It’s public health. It involves some fascinating epidemiology. And they want a GP to sit on one of its committees. It’s right up my alley. I was thinking about it until I read more closely.

According to the notice, the position will be reimbursed at 50% of the rate of the F1 category for committee members. It took a bit of looking, but I found the schedule of rates. The F1 rate is the lowest possible tier of reimbursement. For a full day, the fee payable is $191. And you can only claim a travel allowance if it takes more than four hours to get to the meetings. And the reimbursement is only 50% of that rate. Which means an 8-hour day comes out at $11.938 per hour. If I was to include my travel time (1.5-2 hours each way), that would drop to $8.304 an hour. To put this in context, the hourly rate for junior shop assistants on a casual contract is $12.345 — when they are 18 years old and have no supervisory or management duties.

I would still consider the position if I wasn’t already burning up my goodwill to the government working at the University of Queensland, a position that pays me about half what I would earn if I spent the same time in general practice (and I am not a high revenue earner compared to most of my colleagues). But what I am trying to understand is how the same ministers who go on about the importance of public health and of training more doctors seem to be doing their level best to make it highly unrewarding to anyone who might want to actually achieve these tasks.