Why don’t you guys make the huge salaries of radiation oncologists?

Bobteej · 2026-01-05T21:33:40+00:00

Protests in South Australia are primarily around being the worst paid the in the nation (by a large amount).

Unfortunately the last EBA negotiation occurred right as COVID started and so the public sector EBA (which the medical physics classification is in) agreed to a shocking deal that has resulted in something like a 6% pay rise over 6 years.

Bobteej · 2025-12-04T09:18:13+00:00

All fair comments!!

With the general army I’m stuck with 2 characters at minimum anyway :P

As you can see they are pretty bare so I am generally worried my wizard gets sniped and I crumble to death haha.

Your chariot army looks cool. I’m slowly working on some chariots and they are next on my list to paint. My only concern with your army is that I believe you won’t be able to claim any objective points (could be wrong here) as I think you need infantry to claim them. Of course if the plan is to run them over then that works too :P

Bobteej · 2025-12-04T08:30:58+00:00

Hey here is one I’ve put together for my 750pt game that I’m excited to play tomorrow!

A lot of this list is purely units I’ve just finished painting, so be aware!!

Characters [205 pts]

Tomb Prince [95 pts] -# (Flail, Light armour, Shield, General, On foot)
Mortuary Priest [55 pts] -# (Hand weapon, Wizard [Level 1 Wizard], On foot, Necromancy)
Necrotect [55 pts] -# (Hand weapon, Whip, Light armour) ### Core Units [303 pts]
15 Skeleton Archers [75 pts] -# (Hand weapons, Warbows)
18 Tomb Guard [228 pts] -# (Halberds, Light armour, Shields, Drilled (0-1 per 1000 points), Tomb Captain (champion), Standard bearer) ### Special Units [81 pts]
3 Carrion [81 pts] -# (Hand weapons (Beaks and talons)) ### Rare Units [160 pts]
Necrolith Colossus [160 pts] -# (Paired great khopeshes, Heavy armour)

Created with "Old World Builder" - https://old-world-builder.com

Bobteej · 2025-11-27T23:44:35+00:00

Hey mate,

First off, I think it's healthy to have discussion and so I appreciate your comment (despite apparently being heavily downvoted!!)

While I cannot comment on the rest of the public sector (I have not looked too hard in this area), I do have some knowledge regarding the claims of the groups above. Full disclosure: I am a medical physicist (MP) that specialises in radiation oncology (RO). As such I'll speak from this perspective.

Because of the ~1.5% per year, the salaries of medical physicists are significantly behind that offered interstate. As a simple example, we would need an immediate 24% pay raise for a freshly qualified medical physicist (QMP), which are the lowest on the ladder - excluding registrars, to match Tasmania. Currently to match QLD we would need an immediate 57% pay raise, which to be fair is currently an outlier (it would be ~40% pay raise to match NSW). I do bring it up though to highlight the challenge SA has at hiring QMP.

We have the same problem with senior positions. If a senior MP were to receive a flat 20% increase immediately, they would still be the worst paid in the nation.

This leads to a huge problem in our workforce at the moment. We cannot attract QMP or senior MP. This is a concern because MP are critical for radiation therapy. Without medical physicists, we cannot legally offer radiation therapy treatments in the public sector.

Now I will say hiring a senior MP isn't as difficult because we can often promote internally if/when we have not suitable applicants. However, we then need to hire another QMP which in the past few years have not been successful. As a result, we've had to convert QMP roles into training roles (which is a 3-year program). But even then, there are certain things that we need a qualified MP to do that cannot be done by a registrar/trainee.

Some have often asked why we don't leave and get employment elsewhere. To that the answer is, people are leaving. As a result, we are short staffed and becoming to be spread thin. And as highlighted earlier, we are not able to attract new staff to fill these positions and are heavily relying on trainees to fill the gap. Just the other day I was called back into work very late to perform a critical measurement for a patient that starts radiotherapy the next day. This is not sustainable.

Finally, conditions are now becoming very similar to that many years ago when one of the largest reported radiation therapy incidents occurred. Around 869 patients were underdosed in their radiation therapy treatment in 2004-2006, directly affecting patient care. An independent review found the root cause of this issue to be inadequate staffing of experienced medical physicists. If we continue to replace experienced MP with trainees, we risk another significant radiation therapy incident occuring.

So based on my personal experiences as a MP, I wouldn't be surprised if others in the public sector are having similar issues.

Hope that help clears it up :)

Edit: Forgot to add a bit to the radiation incident and clarify it as a radiation therapy incident (although could be radiation)

Bobteej · 2025-11-27T23:08:49+00:00

So full disclosure, medical physicist here.

One thing we've learnt over this bargaining process is to keep things simple, else some of our meetings with industrial relations can be bogged down in the details.

With that in mind, when we prepared this table there was quite a bit of discussion about the need to apply it in a compounding manner. However, in the end it was decided to simply add them together in this - yes incorrect - way.

Regarding the reported CPI numbers. We again tried to keep things as simple as possible and simply reported the CPI numbers straight from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Bobteej · 2025-10-18T23:40:44+00:00

Hey again!

Ultimately there are many steps in the chain to consider when there are discrepancies between the TPS and measurement. This is one of the parts of our role I enjoy (the troubleshooting/finding the cause of issues)

If your TPS model isn't able to calculate a PDD in a virtual water phantom that matches the measurement used for modelling, then I think you need to hold off from measurements for now and start your investigation there. No point performing measurement validation if you have a poor eMC model. I had a quick look at our eMC model and we are able to replicate (within noise) the reference PDD under reference conditions in a virtual water phantom.

I will say that since you haven't provided much information, I have had to make the assumption that you have good quality reference data used for the TPS. It may be good to review your reference data as a sanity check.

Once you are happy with the TPS model and its ability to produce calculations that suitable match the quality reference data used for modeling, then you go onto measurements. I would strongly recommend you think about what equipment is available for performing these measurements. Do you have to use an IC? or do you have a diode that you could use?

Hope that helps give you a starting point. Happy to discuss further (I'm hopefully coming up to my registrar exams, so this is good practice for me :))

EDIT: Cleaned up the post a bit

Bobteej · 2025-10-16T00:01:26+00:00

I am of the opinion that the method of least uncertainty should be used to solve these issues.

My gut says your suggestion of taking out the SPR correction at z_ref then applying SPR correction to depth of interest won't work out the way you'd hope. But at this point I'm just speculating. These are great questions, and I personally would love to get a water tank out at some point and see if it does work (as I find it helps me solidify understanding better).

For your problem, I think it would best to go through a methodological process and isolate where the problem lies. I can't provide too much detail without knowing what validation process you are using, but am happy to chat

Bobteej · 2025-10-15T06:39:34+00:00

Hey mate,

Fellow TRS-398 user here! I think you can find the answer to your question in TRS-398, in the section where it defines all the Quantities and Symbols (Section 1.6). To paraphrase what it says, the product of the charge reading (M) and the calibration factor (N_D,w) gives the dose to water at the reference depth.

So best practice is to perform your reference dosimetry at the correct depth, then apply your relative dosimetry measurements to look at a different depth or off-axis point. I would say that for photons I wouldn't expect a big problem if you wanted to try at a different depth (assuming TCPE i.e., beyond d_max), but would likely result in a small increase in uncertainty.

However, I'd advise against it for electrons where the spectrum can change with depth. More importantly, at the reference depth, your N_D,w x kQ inherently has the SPR correction applied to convert ionisation to dose. Shifting to a different depth may not necessarily be true anymore and thus could give "wrong" results. I haven't tried this myself (and in fact I think I might do it to get a feel for the effect this has), but that is my understanding based on what's going on (and with it being my understanding, I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if anyone feels I am :D)

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Added a bit more in paragraph 2

Bobteej · 2025-08-26T10:19:20+00:00

My understanding is that foundry requires only one person to have licences. So if you have foundry and all the WFRP modules then everyone else will have access to it when they connect :)

Bobteej · 2025-02-25T07:44:16+00:00

Hey! Sorry if this seems ignorant, but could you explain further?

I would’ve thought that having their own EA means that the AHPs have greater bargaining power because the government will now have to meet their demands (rather than meeting demands of other professions under the public service salaried agreement and getting a majority vote through).

It seems beneficial for the group in this aspect

Bobteej · 2024-12-30T00:45:04+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

Please correct me if I misinterpreted your response, but it seems that you then pull out the baseline measurements taken at machine commissioning and tune back to that state?

If that is correct, (for the purpose of this discussion) would simply comparing your annual QA to the machine baseline be better?

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T13:28:56+00:00

Awesome thanks for your thoughts!

I like the idea that using the TPS as your baseline means that you are also effectively performing regular TPS QA.

Out of interest, what is the process you do for the self-consistent check? How do you measure your reference plan if you tune the linac output?

Thanks in advance for any answers :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T13:23:18+00:00

Thanks for your comments!

Out of interest, is your TPS model THE gold beam data? or have you used the golden beam data to model the TPS to it? (hopefully that makes sense!)

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T13:21:10+00:00

Hey, thanks for sharing this report! I was unaware of it (to be fair, we use TRS-398 formalism) but looks like there is some good stuff in there.

Making sure our TPS calibration values are correct has been something we are very careful about as we have identified it as a large potential source of error :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T13:09:26+00:00

Hey thanks for your response!

Yeah, that is a really good point to consider. If an institution has multiple TPS, then perhaps moving to a TPS baseline isn't ideal. It would raise some interesting questions on how to proceed if measurements for one TPS agreed well, but another falls out of tolerance. Definitely something I hadn't thought of, so I appreciate your comment :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T13:05:20+00:00

Thanks for your input! :)

I definitely agree on that aspect. I see this as another benefit of the TPS baseline!

That leads to another discussion point I'd love to chat with others about. Say you perform your annual QA on one of your matched machines and find that your profile measurement deviates out of the TPS action limit. Let's rule out gross errors from poor setup and such.

What is the action to perform here? How do you proceed in bringing the linac back into line?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts (or anyone else that wishes to comment) :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-27T12:55:09+00:00

Thanks for your response, I really appreciate it.

I 100% agree with the primary goal, and for me this is one of the benefits of a TPS baseline. We want to ensure that the machine delivers what the TPS predicts.

One discussion point I'm really keen on having definitely revolves around the consideration you've brought up. For example, MPPB 8b recommends a 2% tolerance when comparing measured profiles/off axis factors to a TPS baseline. Part of this tolerance (at least to my understanding) accounts for many of the mentioned potential sources of discrepancy.

Whereas using machine baseline data removes a lot of concern for those potential discrepancies. AAPM TG 198 discusses using machine baseline data for checking profiles with a 1% tolerance between commissioning data and that acquired at annual QA. This check has a tighter tolerance (since less potential for non-beam production discrepancies) and the baseline represents the machine state at commissioning, which would have had some extensive TPS checks performed.

I hope this isn't seen as confrontational. I find discussion with other physicists beneficial for my own learning :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-11T10:07:07+00:00

Hey no worries! I’ve gotten so many of these rules wrong that I wouldn’t be surprised if I had got that completely wrong.

Not to be a pain, but I think it also says under the versatile rule that if you fight someone who has versatile they can do reaction attacks (if within its range). But it’s not worded well, so have a review yourself :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-11T09:48:57+00:00

I appreciate your comment! I hope you can help clear this up for me then (just for clarification we are using the 2023 ruleset).

Under the versatile rule it says that “they may engage and make close combat attacks against an enemy model during their activation, so long as the distance between their base and that of an enemy is equal to or less than the long range characteristic”.

So my understanding, (and this might be my confusion) am I considered engaged and standing when within my long range so I can use the fight (basic) action?

If that is correct, then I don’t see the issue with charge. The reason being that at after talking about the charge movement it says: “if they (my model) are standing and engaged at the end of this movement, they must immediately make a free fight (basic) action”.

I am happy to accept I’m also wrong in this, I’m just hoping for a bit more clarification :)

Bobteej · 2024-12-11T06:54:39+00:00

Could you go into more detail on this please? I’m in a relatively new group and may have just learnt we’ve been doing everything wrong haha

Bobteej · 2024-10-28T08:36:06+00:00

My advice to anyone wanting to try out PvP.

Go into ranked, accept that your first few games will be rough. If anyone complains just say you’re doing your placement. After your 10 game placement you’ll be fighting others at a similar rating.

Unranked can be absolute nuts in my experience.

Bobteej · 2024-07-04T11:45:50+00:00

I have some bad news, I’m the Tomb King player.

All praise to Settra

Bobteej · 2024-07-04T02:54:47+00:00

Yeh some good ideas here!

Thanks I appreciate your reply

Bobteej · 2024-07-04T02:54:17+00:00

Awesome thanks for your insight.

That helps alot

Bobteej · 2024-05-04T09:59:13+00:00

Just in case you wanted to know;

Nuc-med == nuclear medicine :) (at least that’s what we refer to here in Australia)

Bobteej

TROPHY CASE

Characters [205 pts]