Where Do My Membership Dues Dollars Go?

Part 1

Like so many of you, I too recently paid my annual AAPM dues for 2019. And I thank you for your support, commitment, and continued dedication to the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. Through your support and efforts, AAPM remains the premiere organization in medical physics.

However, when making that payment you may ask yourself:

1. What benefit am I receiving from my membership in AAPM?
2. Where are my dues dollars going?

I started answering these questions and the column started to become too long. So, I thought I would answer these questions in installments.

In this column, I want to focus on the following: current access to National Council of Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) and International Commission of Radiation Units and Measurements (ICRU) reports and also upcoming access to International Council on Radiation Protection (ICRP) reports too. No matter what subspecialty our members are, one time or the other we would have used, cited and read these reports. In fact, many of our members have and are serving on these councils and commission and have authored reports.

Let's start with NCRP reports. Figure 1 shows who among the AAPM members are using these reports and the savings members have realized by the free access to these reports. More detailed information can be found here.

Annually, through an arrangement with NCRP, we budget $35,000 for free access to NCRP documents and the benefits we all receive are significant. Basically, assuming our current membership is around 8000, then $4.38 of our annual dues are going towards NCRP reports and as of now the quantifiable benefit is greater than $2.1 million dollars.

Now let us examine the information regarding ICRU reports. Figure 2 shows who among the AAPM members are using these reports and the savings members have realized by the free access to these reports. More detailed information can be found here.

Annually, we budget $25000 for free access to ICRU documents and the benefits we all receive are significant. Basically, assuming our current membership is around 8000, then $3.13 of our annual dues are going towards ICRU reports and as of now the quantifiable benefit is greater than $2.6 million dollars.

Soon AAPM members will have free access to ICRP reports also.

I would like to continue providing this type of information in subsequent newsletter issues. In my next column, I will focus on the membership benefits with regard to AAPM publications. Please let me know if you have any questions or you can tweet me. I would like to thank Angela Keyser, AAPM's Executive Director, Robert A. McKoy, AAPM's Director of Finance, and Michael Woodard, AAPM's Deputy Executive Director, for compiling the stats used in my column.