SFHQ Medic's Manual by Katherine Dedul

(Reproduced with permission from Katherine Dedul)

Introduction:

So you're thinking you'd like to try your hand at being a medical officer. Excellent, medical officers have a lot of respect, especially when you're the only thing standing between an officer and them being cleared for active duty.

We're going to start with the absolute basics and go into a bit more complex matters. This manual will cover the basics, but will provide you with links to excellent websites like Memory Alpha which contain more detailed information if you wish to use them. Our goal here isn't to bombard you with a bunch of information that may be of use to you, but rather to give you the tools necessary to succeed in a medical posting on a ship.

Positions in Medical:

There are many different types of medical officers, some environments in SFHQ will contain some unfamiliar names, but for our purposes we're going to go over the standard 24th Century positions. If you're ever in doubt what positions a 23rd Century or Expansion Fleet environment might have, e-mail the CO of that area, they'll be happy to clear up any confusion!

Nine times out of ten, you will be a doctor on the ship, but it doesn't hurt to know what other positions are available to you in this field because if there is nobody playing these positions on the ship, they need to be filled with NPCs(Non-Player Characters, sometimes called NEs or Nameless Ensigns) and you may be permitted to create at least one or two of these characters.

A. Chief Medical Officer

This is the senior most medical position on the ship. The Chief Medical Officer or CMO holds the authority to relieve even the Commanding Officer(CO) of duty if there is just cause to do so. This officer delegates all members of the medical team on any 24th Century ship(and on most military type ships). They are responsible for the health of the crew as well as dealing with any casualties the ship might encounter if they are responding to a medical emergency. The CMO will often work closely with the ship's Counselor(CNS) if there is one to ensure the crew is both mentally and physical fit. CMOs are almost always doctors.

B. Head Nurse & Nurse

This may be a position on a ship. Nurses and other support staff are typically harder positions to play because they are typically more in the background, however if you are up for a challenge, this position may be available to you, even if it is simply you playing a NPC. The Head Nurse is the senior member of the nursing staff, he or she will be responsible for delegating nursing duties to other members of the nursing staff and working closely with the CMO to ensure that the department is operating at peak efficiency. Nurses can preform basic medical duties like crew physicals, fixing minor injuries like broken limbs and cuts and they assist doctors in more complex procedures like surgery. They will also typically preform triage duty in emergency situations while the doctors focus on working on the more serious cases, therefore a nurse must have enough medical knowledge to diagnose how serious medical problems are to determine where in the line these cases must be put. Nurses are under the command of the Head Nurse who is then under the command of the CMO. Nurses for the most part though are played by NPCs.

C. Doctor

This is a typical position for you if you're playing a Medical Junior Officer(Med). Doctors are easier to role-play than nurses and other support staff likely because there a lot more information about what a doctor does than what a nurse or medic does in the 24th century(For example Doctor Crusher got a lot more screen time than Nurse Ogawa). They preform all the basic duties that a nurse might otherwise do as well as more complex things like healing serious injuries, finding cures for diseases and preforming surgery. Doctors are directly under the command of the CMO. On medical cruisers, you may find doctors are further subdivided into specialty such as Surgeon, Virologist, Pathologist, etc.

D. Medic

Medics typically are the first responders to an emergency, they can diagnose and sometimes treat minor injuries. They know advanced first aid and typically are charged with keeping their patient alive until a more senior member of the medical department such as a doctor can get to them. Typically medics are played by NPCs.

Basic Tenets of Medicine:

This section concerns some basic concepts you might want to take with you as you play your medical character.

A. Triage

In an emergency situations, when sickbay is bombarded with mass casualties, triage must be preformed. Usually nurses preform these, but in the beginning stages a doctor may assist the nurses in organizing the casualties before he or she must move on into dealing with the most serious of cases. The process of triage determines which patients see a doctor first and groups patients according to how serious their injuries are.

The typical stages of triage are as follows(most ships will follow this or some variation of this):

i)Red - The patient is still alive, but they will not remain so unless they are seen soon by a doctor. Such injuries that a red patient might have include massive internal injuries and other life threatening injuries. Typically if the patient's respiration or heart rate is compromised the results could be fatal.

ii)Yellow - The patient requires medical attention within six hours. Their injuries are potentially life threatening, but they can wait until the Red patients are stabilized. The patient will require monitoring while they wait.

iii)Green - Sometimes known as the "walking wounded", these patients can wait until the red and yellow patients have been stabilized and taken care of. Some may require monitoring, others may not. These are minor injuries that are not-likely to compromise the patients health further than they already have.

iv)Black - These patients typically are so seriously injured that treating them would compromise the treatment of red and yellow patients or the patient simply is so injured that there is no medical technology available to save them. They are beyond hope and a member of the medical staff should see that they are made comfortable.

If you aren't certain as to what system you should be using, check with your CMO, if you are the CMO, then it would be your choice.

You can read more at great length about triage through wikipedia if you so desire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triage

B. Hypocratic Oath

Doctors are sworn from the moment they receive their medical license to preform their duties ethically. The basic tenets of the oath are that doctors are to provide the very best that they are capable of giving to their patients and to respect their privacy. For our purposes, it is important that you recognize that this is a very ethical profession and that if you are playing a character who takes their job seriously(Sometimes we all like to play the black sheep of the ship, but not always) you have to consider that your character would very likely take this oath seriously and ensure that they provide the best care that they can for their patients.

You can read at great length about the history and modern interpretations of the oath via wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocratic_oath

C. Other

Crew Physicals - All new members of the crew will require a trip to sickbay to ensure that they are healthy enough to assume their duties on the ship. As well, if you've noticed the CO of your ship hasn't been in sickbay in awhile, you might want to chase him down for one as crew are required to have one done periodically.

Diagnostics - If you're bored, you can always have your character check over the equipment in sickbay to ensure it's all ready to go. Faulty equipment does not save patients and therefore it's important to ensure this is done. Typically nurses would assist in this as well.

Tools of the Trade:

This section will briefly introduce you to tools that you'll need to use as a medical officer and provide you with links to where you can find much more detailed information.

A. Medical Equipment aids a medical officer in treating a variety of ailments, transporting patients who cannot move on their own and diagnosing ailments.

Check out Memory Alpha's extensive listing of equipment:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Medical_equipment

B. Medicines are used to treat a variety of symptoms, help stabilize a patient's vital signs, put a patient to sleep, wake a patient up, etc.

Check out Memory Alpha's extensive drug wiki:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Drugs_and_treatments

C. Ailments, you'll be treating these in order to keep your patients happy.

Check out Memory Alpha's listing for Medical Conditions:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Medical_conditions

This isn't everything, sometimes a GM will give you a made up disease, for example, but this listing will at least give you a starting place if you happen to be given the name of the disease.

There's a New Mission, but you're not directly involved...Now what?

You may sometimes find yourself waiting around for action in a mission, medical often takes a back seat unless the mission involves providing aid to a colony or ship that took on heavy casualties.

This chapter is designed to provide you with some ideas on what you can do if the main mission isn't keeping you busy. This is important because you are promoted based on the quality of your in character posts, which doesn't seem fair when you are in a department that doesn't often get much action.

It can be as simple as having a clumsy NE who constantly comes into sickbay from falling in the jeffries tubes or burning themselves with a plasma torch. Maybe there's a shy NE who likes your character and constantly comes in complaining of various maladies to hopefully grow closer to you.

It may seem silly, but you may find that your side plot grows on you. Start simply and you may even find that your little subplot will become a complex and elaborate back story for your character.

Some suggestions to get you started:

-A hypochondriac NE that you always seem to get stuck helping.
-A lovesick NE who keeps coming in with made up symptoms in attempts to get your attention.
-A clumsy NE keeps breaking parts of their body and you always seem to be on duty whenever they stop by with their latest injury.

Conclusion:

This concludes our lesson on the basics of playing in the medical department. Hopefully you found this informative and are even more excited at the prospect of playing a medical officer out there in SFHQ!

Testing Materials:

The following are scenarios that the medical course instructor may use when testing the cadets on the Academy ship. Instructors may come up with an entirely new scenario for you, but these should give you a pretty good idea of what will be expected of you when you are tested. It's up to you to make up any details that are not otherwise provided in the scenarios.

A. Emergencies:

i) You are the CMO and your ship is the first responding vessel to a Federation Colony of approximately 20,000 citizens. A massive storm system has caused massive destruction. Their medical facilities have been wiped out and their sick and injured require care.

ii) You are the Head Nurse and your ship has responded to a desolate planet which was the site of a fierce battle between the Klingons and the Romulans. Nobody knows why they were fighting over this world or who started it, but your job, as directed by the CMO, is to have yourself and four of your nurses conduct triage.

iii) You are the CMO and your ship has responded to a distress call from a Federation Civilian Transport Vessel. They have a major hull breach and have casualties from all parts of their vessel. While engineering assists in repairs, you must conduct triage and assist the injured.

B. Physicals & Other Routine Matters:

i) It's a quiet day on your ship, one of the engineers comes in with a burnt hand, he was working in the Jeffries Tubes and got himself zapped by an exposed panel. You're the doctor on duty.

ii) You're the doctor on duty and the surly security chief has just come in for his regularly scheduled physical exam. The CMO is not on duty and the nurse has just left for her dinner break.

iii)You're the duty nurse on night watch, it was a quiet night so the Doctor told you to hold down the fort while he went and grabbed a coffee, leaving you alone in sickbay. A civilian patient comes in complaining that his left arm has been hurting for the past two days. He collapses on the deck shortly after, unconscious.

C. Lab Work:

i)You're the virologist on board when doctors and nurses are overrun with patients complaining of uncontrollable twitching. This is rapidly becoming an epidemic, your task is to collect and analyze cultures taken from each patient to try and find a cure.

ii) A Federation colony is under seige, not from any discernable enemy, but rather by a strange disease that is dehydrating the citizens. You're one of the doctors trying to determine the cause.

iii) You feel like you're on a ship of fools...literally. You are the CMO and everyone around you is falling victim to mental instability. You were playing host to a party of scientists(The team consists of a Human, Andorian, Trill, Betazoid and a Napeean) who were isolated the last five years in an experimental deep space isolation experiment.