Chief Medical Officer
| MEDICAL & COMMAND STAFF | |
  Chief Medical Officer |
Alternative Titles: Medical Director, Head of Medical Access: All Medical Departments, Bridge, Chief Medical Officer's Office, Brig, Brig Infirmary Additional Access: N/A Difficulty: Hard to Very Hard Supervisors: Captain Subordinates: Medical Doctor, Chemist, Geneticist, Virologist, Paramedic, and Psychiatrist Duties: Coordinate doctors and other medbay employees, ensure they know how to save lives and use the cryo chamber, check for injuries on the crew monitor. Guides: Guide to genetics, Virology 101, Guide to medicine, Guide to Wounds, Suit Sensors, Guide to Surgery, Guide to chemistry, Chain of Command, Disk Procedure Minimum Age: 30 Quote: Take the goddamn vaccine or I will non-harmfully beat the ssshit out of you and force you to take it! |
You are the ultimate line of defense between the station and permanent death. You oversee your department of potentially functional MDs, make sure people are resurrected or robotized, be certain the virologist doesn't cause an outbreak, and so much more. CMO is an underappreciated position with a wide variety of resources and responsibilities that are entirely essential to a functional station.
Bare minimum requirements: Remind the crew about suit sensors, see that cryo is set up, wrangle your staff.
Command, Medbay, and You
When you first arrive, your goal should be to familiarize yourself with your fellow command staff and Medbay. Say hi, start a conversation, try to gauge the attitude and experience of your peers, and take mental notes. Make an announcement for people to max their Suit Sensors and then head to your office. In your locker will be several items; however, the most important to grab will be the compact defibrillator, door remote that functions as a way to bolt and open/close doors, your Hypospray Deluxe, and the defib wall mount that will allow you to mount a defibrillator on a wall.
Runtime
Runtime is your pet cat who starts her day in your office, and most likely never leaves your office (unless R&D is fucking around with the E.X.P.E.R.I-MENTOR). She lounges around, sipping on expensive space milk, meowing and mewing all day long. It's the best life a space cat can have, and she is all yours to snuggle with and pet. Some say she is not important, as Ian is the most important pet they say (how dare they), but this is simply not true. While Ian may have more abilities like wearing things, Runtime is a space cat, who don't need no human. She is there because she allows it.
Your Staff
As mentioned previously, upon arrival, you should try to measure up and keep tabs on your staff to gauge their attitude of knowledge. You should exercise patience with newer players and attempt to guide and teach them. If someone is acting intentionally obnoxious or counterproductive, warn them, and if they continue, you are well within your rights to fire them. Otherwise, your primary focus should be coordinating your staff to try and work efficiently. As CMO, you shouldn’t be the one doing everything, that should be your staff, and you exist there to function as a leader, teacher, and someone to fill in the gaps in your workforce. Trying to be a completionist and overbearing, and generally trying to do everything yourself, isn’t fun for many other people. Remember that your Medical Doctors and Chemists and everyone else want to play the game, too. The two jobs you should attempt to monitor the most are chemistry and virology. Ensure that your chemist is, at the very least, producing healing chemicals before they go off and start their chemical adventures. If they are unfamiliar with what to make or what is useful, list different healing medicines and the best way to administer them so they have something to work off of. Whether or not you want your chemist to make narcotics is down to your discretion. However, you should ensure that the doses they make them in should not enough to cause someone to have an addiction or overdose. With your virologist, check in occasionally on what they're making and ensure they don't release viruses without your approval; have them ask before doing so. If they struggle with making a healing virus or seem unknowledgeable, try to educate them on some good starter viruses.
Command
As Chief Medical Officer, you are a direct link between command and medical. If any command member meets an ill fate or requires medical attention, you should be the first to know and the one to heal them. While healing, you should take extra care to ensure that their belongings remain as they were when they first arrived in medbay, as some opportunistic individuals may attempt to steal an item or access from you while you are distracted. If command, or generally anyone, dies, you should likely let security know before attempting to retrieve them not to risk yourself or your paramedics. If there is an AI, ask them to scout the area to ensure no foul play.
Delegation and Prioritization
When you are CMO, you should attempt to learn how to prioritize healing and reviving based on injury and rank. It would be best if you were prioritizing command, sec, then medical over everyone else when reviving; however, these are more so soft guidelines, and the state in which a patient is will heavily affect this. For example, if you have a research director roll in and they are missing all of their organs with 600 brute damage while you have a bartender has 150 burn damage, it would be better to prioritize the bartender as the time to heal is low. However, if you have a doctor on hand, you would order them to fix the bartender while you work on the research director. There are over a million different scenarios that play out, and it will take time to get used to, and it will be hard at first, but as long as you stay calm and use your brain, you should be fine. Remember to utilize your doctors and give them orders, helping them stay organized and focused in an emergency. If they are experienced, you should be able to trust them to work by themselves, however, don't feel scared to try to move them around.
What to do when there's nothing to do
In medical, there are frequent times when absolutely nothing is happening. While this may be boring, there are a few activities that you can do to pass the time, both productive and non-productive. If someone is new, you should try to teach them about surgery and essential medicine. Empty bodies from genetics are the perfect way to demonstrate this. The same goes for your chemist; if they are new, teach them which chemicals are good or help them make healing mixes. If there is nobody in virology or a slot open in genetics, you could fill in the gaps for those to pass the time. There are also ways that you can benefit other departments as well. Ask for a bounty sheet from cargo if they haven't brought one already and have you or your staff complete them. Frequently botany will want saltpetre or unstable mutagen, so make a beaker or so of those and bring them over. Make drying agent and space cleaner for the janitor, radiation meds for engineers and atmospheric technicians, ethanol for the bartender, and so on. Alternatively, you could attempt to communicate and, gasp, roleplay with your staff. Grab a deck of cards or some dice from the library and play a game of uno or blackjack. Talk about whatever is on your mind or play guess that song; there is a whole array of activities that you can attempt to do if your staff are willing, and you are creative enough.
Emergencies
Your time to shine; there will be a variety of disasters and emergencies that'll test your abilities as a doctor and a leader. It'd be impossible to account for every situation, and it'll take time to learn how to counter each one. However, here are some of the more common disasters you may face.
Viral Outbreak
It starts with a cough or an "I'm not feeling well." While a lot of diseases may be mild and, at most, annoying, there are Sentient Disease/some that will rapidly mutate and prove to be dangerous. If any individual claims to be sick, take a blood sample and have your virologist scan it in the PanD.E.M.I.C 2200 to identify the symptoms and cure. Once the cure is identified, have you or your virologist collaborate with chemistry to produce and pass it out. Once someone is cured, take a blood sample from them; you can use this can be used to create a vaccine at the PanD.E.M.I.C 2200 Once this is done, the only tricky part should be wrangling people and having them take the vaccine; broadcasting that there is one with your announcement system should help with this. Only .1u of a vaccine is required if injected, but 5u is required if ingested.
Parts of the station being uninhabitable
There are several ways that large parts of the station may be uninhabitable, and not everyone will have the proper protection when it happens. If large areas are spaced, have your geneticist print out space adaptation for people to grab, and hold onto some yourself to pass out; same goes for heat adaptation if the station is too hot. If you have a virologist, try to have them produce a self-respiration virus, however this isn't as reliable as it is entirely down to RNG.
Xenomorph and Zombie infestation
If xenomorphs or zombies are called out, medical will be responsible for halting their progression due to the ability to remove tumors and embryos. Ensure that your staff knows how to remove them and have you or your paramedics coordinate with security to retrieve bodies safely. Always have charcoal or any form of anti-toxin on hand in the case of a zombie outbreak. Keep an escape route in mind and have you and your staff evacuate if there is a significant push and you are unarmed and attempt to regroup in areas such as the holodeck medbay or the brig. DO NOT, under any circumstances, attempt to clone a zombie, it will break the cloner and you will need to rebuild it.
Blob
If a blob appears, prepare your staff for many bodies and injured individuals. Once the area of a blob is located, it is wise to attempt to set up a secondary and small medical area outside of where the blob is to try to get people up and running; blob is a war of attrition, and medbay will often be one of the major deciding factors between success or station destruction, so plan accordingly and act decisively.
Tools
As Chief Medical Officer, you will have access to various tools and machines you and your staff can use to aid people. It is best that you don't rely on one machine or tool to heal people but instead learn of the advantages and disadvantages of each one and attempt to use them to run medbay as efficiently as possible.
Surgery
Advantages - infinite, can be used to solve most issues
Disadvantages - without advanced surgeries can be slow and time-consuming, consumes manpower, requires a surgery bed
Surgery is the bulk of what you and your medical doctors will be using to heal and revive people, and as such, you should be familiar with most, if not every, surgery in the game. As CMO, you'll start with advanced surgery tools, which are faster than the default ones, and also come with the benefit of each functioning as two separate tools. When performing surgery, it is best to strip your patient, as most require that anyways, as well as use morphine or anesthesia. Not only is it good RP, but it also helps reduce flinch damage that'll occur when completing surgery steps.
Sleeper
Advantages - can repair organs when upgraded, doesn't consume manpower, infinite as long as there is power, can slowly heal dead people.
Disadvantages - slow even when upgraded, can only fix a small number of issues, cannot fix nonfunctional organs.
Sleepers are nifty little machines that, when used, will passively heal brute and burn damage and, when upgraded, can also heal organs and toxin damage. It's best that you don't rely on the sleeper due to its slow nature and instead use it as a backup tool for when you are flooded with more patients than you can handle. Although, the organ healing function of the sleeper can be beneficial if you don't have the time to fully replace someone's damaged organs if they're moderately damaged.
Cryo
Advantages - Fast, heals wounds and clone damage, doesn't consume manpower, cools people down quickly.
Disadvantages - People will be asleep when they come out, and cryoxadone causes dizziness.
Arguably a better sleeper, the cryo tube can be used to heal brute, burn, suffocation, toxin, and clone damage at quick speeds, as well as remedy all forms of wounds. However, a slight downside is that patients will remain asleep for a bit, and cryoxadone, the chemical that cryo uses, causes dizziness, which may cause annoyance on the patients' part. It's best to use cryo to keep patients out of critical condition while you focus on someone else (don't forget about them!) or toss someone in there post-revival, as it is the best way to heal suffocation damage.
Cloning
Advantages - People cloned will be rid of every issue outside of traumas and can be used to cure addictions.
Disadvantages - When not upgraded fully, causes clone damage, random mutations, and cannot clone people with the short telomeres trait. It also is somewhat boring and causes memory loss.
Cloning is the easiest way to revive someone. Theoretically, you could toss people in cloning and leave it on auto process and call it a day; however, it isn't very fun or interactive for you or your MDs and should mainly be used for body overflow or as a way to revive people if they are in a condition where it would take a lengthy amount of time to revive or fix, or requires resources that are currently unavailable. Also, cloners, unless fully upgraded, are incapable of healing husks or people with short telomeres, so keep that in mind while you're working on reviving people. Also, note that cloning can fix addictions as one doesn't transfer over to the new body; however, any traumas that may exist will still transfer over.
Hypospray Deluxe
Advantages - Can store large amounts of chems in it, which can fix a variety of issues, instant injection.
Disadvantages - People may want to steal it, and most chemicals don't work on dead bodies.
The best tool in your arsenal, the Hypospray Deluxe injects whatever chemical is stored in a vial instantly, as well as is capable of drawing blood and spraying reagents. You start with basic healing meds, but you or your chemist can make chemical cocktails to heal people quickly. Some good combinations are salicylic acid and Libital for brute healing, Oxandrolone and Aiuri for burn, and Epinephrine and Salbutamol for crit patients. Although there are a wide variety of other chemicals you can use, deep dive into the Guide to Chemistry and feel free to be creative. It shines the most when multiple patients are rolling in with moderate to high damage; you can walk around and inject them, pat them on the back, and send them on their way. Another good use for your hypospray is mass vaccinating people. Set your hypospray to 1 u, fill the vial up with a vaccine, and go ham and watch as the frowny faces disappear.
First against the wall
Medbay is about the worst place to be in a mutiny, so chances are your head will be the first to be in disposal. If people are acting strange or starting to get rowdy, arm yourself with anything as soon as possible, and be prepared to flee from medbay at any time. Your telescopic baton is your obvious first choice for self-defense since you can keep someone stunlocked by repeatedly smacking them, though you can still easily be overpowered by groups, and if someone knocks it out of your hand then the tables are completely turned. Other possible weapons are a fire extinguisher axe from the bridge if you're utilitarian, a spray bottle with space lube to buy yourself some time, or a syringe gun if you only need some range.
People see you as weak and distracted, and a good target for any traitor wanting bridge access. Be alert as you work.
Tips
- If someone requires operation on multiple body parts, you can do more than one surgery at once by switching limbs when initiating a step as long as the tool remains in your hand. Even better, though, you can have multiple people operating on different body parts; teamwork makes the dream work!
- If you want to save a bit of time on tending wounds, you can use a synthflesh splash, spray or use a patch on someone to reduce their brute and burn when dead.
- If a husk rolls in, an excellent way to tell the difference is by inspecting the damage done and seeing if there is a "crushed, empty juice pouch" message upon examination. If such a message appears, or if a victim is husked with less than 200 burn damage, then they are likely a ling husk
- Some species function without hearts and, as such, don't start with one. If one rolls in, you can revive them by implanting a heart and defibbing normally or performing brain revival surgery.
- Sterilizine, ethanol, and honey, when sprayed or splashed after surgery is initiated, increases surgery chance; when combined with a roller bed, you can use it to perform surgery on someone with a high probability of success. Useful if there are no beds available or if medbay is inaccessible.
- You can use a chemistry bag to store beakers and hypospray vials, which you can then put in a medkit. Great for when you're trying to save on space!
- The compact defibrillator starts with a fairly weak battery; however, later on, you can ask science for a much better one.
- If an IPC rolls in, it's generally robotics job to fix them, yell at the person who brought them in, and bring the IPC to robotics.
- Most importantly, Runtime can survive anything while in your bag as long as the bag isn't destroyed.
