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Psychiatry in Australia: economic and service delivery aspects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Gavin Andrews
Gavin Andrews*
Affiliation:
Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety Disorders, University of New South Wales at St Vincent's Hospital, 299 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010, Australia
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In 1987 there were 1,428 psychiatrists in Australia, 8.8 per 100,000 population (Burvill, 1988), 55% identified as in private practice and 45% in public sector practice. Let us be clear about terms. Public sector practice means that each week you receive a salary from the public purse whether you have seen one or a hundred patients. Private practice means that you are paid on a piece-work basis, also largely from the public purse (national health insurance or Medicare), but the income (at about $100 per hour) depends exactly on the number of hours spent with patients. On average, private psychiatrists in Australia gross about $150,000 per year, out of which they must pay practice expenses. The pay for public sector psychiatrists probably averages $70,000 to which, for the purposes of our calculation, we will add the cost of rooms, telephone and secretary provided by the hospital which at $30,000 brings the cost of a public sector psychiatrist to about $100,000 per year. If 45% of psychiatrists are in public practice then the averaged cost of a psychiatrist in Australia can be calculated as $127,500 per annum, and as there are 8.8 psychiatrists per 100,000 the cost, calculated on this simple basis, is $1.12 million per 100,000 population (Andrews, 1989).

Type
Foreign Report
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 15 , Issue 7 , July 1991 , pp. 446 - 449
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991

References

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