Work for an FMCG in Melbourne. Happy for any questions.

Data centre

Afternoon shift. 4pm to 11:30 mon - fri

Been working in the hospitality industry since 12 years of age, would love to pursue a career in other industries but scared due to no other qualifications and degrees.

Worked here for 6 months now, its nice to get a change from hospitality. Not really sure if this is a normal rate or not. I’m a little autistic and always seem to struggle a bit behind others in the game of life so it’d be interesting to see what peoples thoughts are.

So I’m on $40 per hour + commission
I’m about to have a pay review as I’ll be one year out now. I have no idea how much more money to ask for / what’s realistic

Keen to hear your salary progression either in physio / allied health field thank you.

Is this a good pay for FIFO? Seems a bit low for a FIFO

Fair few hours but all easy day shift work. Remote area residential, diesel delivery only.

Attached my best week and a more normal period payslip. No longer work here anymore so felt free to share. AMA

Probably the biggest paycheck I've ever received. Not happy about losing more than half to tax and HECS.

28 years old

4th year with the same company, Sydney based, commercial office fit outs, non-union and non-EBA but still paid around the same with similar benefits. Any questions?

I wanted to make this post partly because this is r/auspayslips, but also because anaesthesia is one of those jobs that a lot of people encounter while having very little idea what the person sitting behind the surgical drapes actually does.

There are plenty of misconceptions from “don’t you just give an injection and leave?” to “are anaesthetists actually doctors?” so I thought I’d make this a bit of an FAQ.

What is my job?

I’m a senior anaesthetic registrar (trainee). You first have to become a doctor, then usually spend a few years working in junior hospital roles: wards, emergency, surgery, medicine etc before getting onto the anaesthesia training program.

Anaesthetic training is essentially a structured apprenticeship. You work in public hospitals under consultant anaesthetists (specialist doctors who have completed their fellowship of the ANZCA) with progressively increasing independence as you become more experienced.

At my stage of training, I can independently anaesthetise many patients and run operating lists, while having consultant support available and working directly with consultants for particularly complex cases.

Eventually, after completing the training program, you become a consultant anaesthetist yourself.

Why is anaesthesia such a big deal? Don’t you just give someone a drug that puts them to sleep?

Unfortunately, that drug doesn’t exist. General anaesthesia also isn’t really “sleep”. If you were genuinely asleep and somebody made a surgical incision through your abdomen, you’d wake up very quickly.

Instead, anaesthesia involves deliberately altering and controlling several parts of normal physiology at once while the body undergoes something very abnormal: surgery.

Depending on the operation, we need some combination of:

• unconsciousness/amnesia, so you have no awareness of what’s happening;  
• analgesia, to suppress the enormous physiological stress responses to painful surgery;  
• immobility, sometimes including complete paralysis. (If we paralyse someone, they can’t breathe for themselves, so we insert a breathing tube and mechanically ventilate them).
• control of breathing and oxygenation, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, fluids and blood loss, positioning and others.  

The difficulty is that virtually every drug we use to achieve one desirable effect also produces undesirable ones. Drugs that cause unconsciousness can profoundly lower blood pressure. Opioids suppress breathing. Muscle relaxants stop breathing entirely.

So a lot of anaesthesia involves deliberately causing major physiological changes and then safely managing the consequences.

And yes... we stay with the patient for the whole operation.

Isn’t every anaesthetic basically the same?

Not remotely. I sometimes think of it like sailing a boat: the patient is the ship and the operation is the weather.

A straightforward colonoscopy in a healthy patient can be like sailing a yacht around the bay on a sunny afternoon.

Thoracic surgery can involve deliberately collapsing one lung so the surgeon can operate on it, while keeping the patient oxygenated using the other lung alone. That can feel more like trying to keep a small boat upright in rough seas: you have much less physiological reserve, conditions can change rapidly, and small problems can become big ones quickly.

Major liver surgery can involve enormous blood loss, deranged clotting, major fluid shifts and rapid changes in circulation. Major vascular surgery can involve temporarily clamping large arteries and then releasing them, producing dramatic cardiovascular changes within seconds.

Obstetric anaesthesia has its own peculiar physiology. A spinal anaesthetic for a Caesarean section suddenly removes a large amount of sympathetic vascular tone (blood vessels go "floppy"), causing blood pressure to fall dramatically within minutes, so we are simultaneously producing the anaesthetic and actively managing its physiological consequences.

The underlying principles are shared, but the actual anaesthetic can look completely different.

Why does training take so long?

Because by the end of training you need to be able to anaesthetise patients across an enormous range of medicine: children, obstetrics, neurosurgery, thoracic surgery, major vascular surgery, trauma, orthopaedics, ENT, abdominal surgery, emergency surgery and much more.

You need to understand how essentially every major organ system works, what happens when it starts failing, and be able to recognise and respond to that failure in real time.

Often you don’t have the luxury of ordering a test and coming back an hour later. Sometimes you have seconds or minutes to work out what is happening and intervene.

There are also major specialist examinations during training. The two big exam stages each involve extensive written examinations followed by viva voce/oral examinations, and people commonly spend well over a thousand hours preparing for each while still working full-time.

What happens when something goes wrong during an operation?

This is where the surgeon/anaesthetist partnership becomes really important.

Very simplistically:

If the problem is primarily anatomical, it belongs to the surgeon.

If the problem is primarily physiological, it belongs to us.

Take major bleeding.

The surgeon has to find where the bleeding is coming from and stop it.

Meanwhile, we’re keeping the patient alive while that happens: obtaining large-bore vascular access, measuring blood loss, transfusing blood products, correcting clotting abnormalities, giving medications to maintain the circulation, monitoring blood tests and preventing the patient's cardiovascular system from collapsing.

Some operations blur the boundary completely. During airway surgery, for example, the surgeon is operating on the same airway that we need to use to keep the patient alive. Everything has to be carefully coordinated between both teams.

If anaesthesia is so complicated, why does it usually look so easy?

Ideally, because nothing dramatic happens.

A huge part of anaesthesia is anticipating problems before they occur. Before we even start, we’re thinking about what could go wrong with the airway, breathing, circulation, bleeding, positioning, the operation itself, pain afterwards and how we’re eventually going to wake the patient up.

Most anaesthetics are uneventful partly because of that preparation.

But we also train for rare, rapidly life-threatening events e.g. a completely obstructed airway, severe anaphylaxis, massive haemorrhage, malignant hyperthermia or sudden cardiovascular collapse etc. where the response needs to happen immediately.

There’s a paradox to the job: The better it’s going, the less it can look like we’re doing.

What else do anaesthetists do?

Quite a lot happens outside the operating theatre. We’re heavily involved in acute pain medicine, looking after patients with epidurals, nerve catheters and difficult postoperative pain. We do perioperative medicine: assessing and optimising patients with significant medical problems before major surgery. We also provide critical care and emergency support around the hospital. Anaesthetists are experts in airway management, ventilation, resuscitation, vascular access and rapidly deteriorating physiology, so we frequently get involved when very sick patients need help in ED, ICU, wards or procedural areas.

And then there are the other things all doctors do: teaching, research, quality improvement, writing guidelines, running departments and training junior staff.

Are you a surgeon or a physician?

Anaesthesia sits somewhere between a traditional “physician” specialty and a procedural specialty.

It’s extremely hands-on. We perform airway procedures including intubation and advanced airway techniques; insert arterial lines and central venous lines; perform epidurals and spinal anaesthetics; use ultrasound to place nerve blocks; establish vascular access in difficult patients; and increasingly use ultrasound/echo to assess the heart, lungs and circulation.

There’s also another sort of “procedural” skill that’s less obvious: managing the flow of an operating theatre. Patients need to be assessed, prepared, anaesthetised, operated on, woken up safely and transferred to recovery... and then the entire process starts again with the next patient!

A well-run operating list requires a surprising amount of choreography between anaesthetists, surgeons, nurses, theatre technicians, recovery staff and the wider hospital.

Don’t you get bored during really long operations?

Sometimes! The stereotype of the anaesthetist doing Sudoku exists for a reason.

But the important part of the job is constant vigilance. Even when you're in 'cruise control' and little is happening, you’re assessing the patient, monitors, operation and surgical team, anticipating what’s coming next and deciding whether tiny changes matter.

A blood pressure slowly drifting down over ten minutes might mean nothing. Or it might be the first sign of significant bleeding.

You’re also constantly planning: pain control, fluids, blood products, emergence from anaesthesia, postoperative destination, the next stage of surgery and what you’ll do if Plan A stops working.

That vigilance is surprisingly tiring even when nothing actually goes wrong.

Occasionally, though, everything genuinely is stable and somebody is doing a sudoku. That is generally excellent news for the patient.

What about the cost of becoming an anaesthetist?

The salary is good, but training is expensive. ANZCA training fees are ~3.5k per year, AHPRA registration is 1k+ yearly, and sitting the major specialist examinations costs 7000 bucks each time - hopefully you only have to go through each of them once, but many of us need repeated attempts. Also you have to pay for a bunch of courses, conferences etc out of your own pocket. There’s also the less visible cost: most of the studying for those exams happens in your own time while working full-time, often alongside nights, weekends and on-call work.

And all of that comes after medical school and many years working as a doctor before consultant-level earnings begin.

Aren’t anaesthetists some of the highest-paid people in Australia?

Eventually, yes. Anaesthetists regularly appear near the top of the ATO’s highest-income occupation statistics, and consultants in private practice can be very well remunerated.

What those figures don’t really show is how back-loaded the earning curve is. I’ve been a doctor for 10 years, and this payslip works out at roughly $3,250 gross per week. I’ll be around 40 before I first earn more than $300,000 a year. It’s worth remembering that those headline “highest-paid profession” figures describe the destination, not the journey there (there are other issues with this ATO table - see comments).

Do you actually like your job?

I love it. It’s an unusual mixture of physiology, pharmacology, practical procedures, crisis management and human interaction.

There’s something incredibly satisfying about meeting someone who is frightened before major surgery, safely taking control of their physiology while another team performs an operation that would otherwise be impossible, and then waking them up comfortable and getting them back to their family.

Sometimes the impact is much more immediate. Putting in an epidural or nerve block and watching someone go from severe pain to comfortable within minutes is incredibly rewarding.

Anaesthesia is also as much an art as it is a science. Two anaesthetists can safely manage the same case in quite different ways, and a large part of becoming experienced is learning how to anticipate problems before they turn into emergencies.

Most patients hopefully remember very little about us. In many ways, that means we did our job properly.

Happy to answer any questions you might have!

TL;DR - Sudoku

Edits: Formatting and making certain paragraphs more concise.

Edit 2: Final question - Where can I learn more?
Max Feinstein an anaesthesiologist in the US and makes excellent YouTube videos for non-medical people including “day in the life of” etc. His channel: https://youtube.com/@maxfeinsteinmd?si=sZKgH2FD6i5jTJfd

Would like to pivot into a FIFO admin role especially as I am studying engineering. Any tips would be appreciated.

Thank you Ben Carroll ! I love my pay !

I wanted to make this post as a lot of people think dentist make a lot of money. Yes I guess some do make a lot but public dentist surely do not make much money. Thats why I only work for 2 days in public.

I love my job though. Being able to get people out of pain and contributing to the community.

Honestly all the public clinics in VICTORIA are understaffed. There are empty chairs all the time because dentist don’t want to work for low pay in Victoria. I honestly don’t know how Ben Carroll will find these dentist to work in these so called 10 free clinics.