Chief Medical Officer

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Medical and Command

Chief Medical Officer

Access: Chemistry, Chief Medical Officer, Command, Maintenance, Medical
Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Duties: Keep chemistry from blowing a hole in the station and or poisoning it. Make sure medbay has enough meds for your doctors, and generally keep medical running at all costs.
Supervisors: Captain
Subordinates: Chemist, Medical Doctor, Medical Intern, Igor
Guides: Guide to Medical, Medicine

The Chief Medical Officer (commonly referred to as the CMO) is the commanding head of the Medical Department. They are responsible for maintaining the general health of the station's crew.

A shift as CMO can be the most boring experience ever, or some of the most stressful shit of your entire career. Keep your staff in check, well trained, and the medbay working smoothly, and assist in healing the crew with your hypospray. (Keep in mind that it can be very dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands, so keep it close).

The Medical department is often targeted to disrupt attempts to heal those that certain people would prefer stay dead. Stay sharp! Medbay is bombed more often than nearly any other location on the station, and if it is sufficiently damaged all future healing may be significantly slowed. This is, of course, disruptive to the continued functionality of the station.

Responsibilities

The Chief Medical Officer is in charge of keeping Medical up and running no matter the current crisis. It is your responsibility to:

  1. Keep your staff in check. Occasionally you will receive chemists or doctors that will avoid their responsibilities to make LSD or ignore patients. Don't be afraid to replace bad chemists (e.g. not making meds or making dangerous compounds). Chemistry is the absolute heart of medical. Without chemicals (in pill or liquid form), medical is reduced to topicals, epinephrine, and hope.
  2. Make sure that your doctors have quick and easy access to medicine. This includes ordering NanoMed restock boxes and printing defibrillators that both Salvage and your Paramedics stole. Pro tip: Remember to keep defibs charged, and attempt to acquire high-capacity power cells from Science or Security if you can.
  3. Ensure that new medical staff have the proper training they need to start their journey into medical, and this includes new chemists as well. Ensure all new doctors understand the basics of topicals, chemicals, using the defibrillator (as well as turning it off when not in use), and evaluating when a patient is past the point of return.
  4. Endure the constant nagging of the crew. Enact your revenge by making an announcement dunking on people with their coordinates off.
  5. Assist in treating the crew. Your hypospray isn’t just for decoration, it’s a powerful instant needle. You can store up to 30u of reagents in your hypospray. Don't be afraid to have a few different medicines loaded for ease of treatment. Just make sure you're not mixing medicines that react negatively with each other.

Follow the duties above and you should be fine.

Rotting

As the chief medical officer, it is one of your primary responsibilities to manage not only the resources at your disposal, but the time it costs to use those resources as well. While not every patient can realistically be saved, not all time-consuming but revivable patients are lost causes.

The medbay on every map (with the exception of Reach) comes equipped with a morgue, which contains permanent corpse storage for those unrevivable and, more importantly, comes equipped with at least one box of body bags. Corpses placed inside of body bags do not rot while they are inside, allowing you to save that RD with 700 burn damage for until you have the time to deal with them.

Freezers prevent bodies from rotting as well, but they aren't nearly as common as morgues. Freezers can be a valuable method to preserve more corpses until the ever-coveted moment in which you have five minutes to do something other than bail passengers out of the consequences of their own actions, but remember to communicate to your doctors that you are using them! Not all doctors are aware of a freezer's utility, and the last thing you want is for someone's body to be forgotten when they could've been healed and sent home.

Rot-Reversal

With clever use of Cryogenics, it is possible to reverse rotting in the event that a corpse is brought in decayed past the point of defibrillation (or in the event you were busy and didn't notice they were close to rotting.) The chemical Opporozidone (often referred to as Oppo) reverses rotting when used in conjunction with a Cryo pod, and can be created in-house by your chemists. Remain aware that Oppo is incredibly expensive to make, requiring Cognizine and plasma to create, and therefore should be used incredibly sparingly. Prevention is still the best medicine.

Pro Tip: You can place a beaker that is 50% Oppo and 50% Cryoxadone into a Cryo pod to avoid using more Oppo than is necessary on a single rotted patient.

Resource Management

There will be times in which you will be brought in corpses that are technically recoverable but that would be an incredible time sink to revive. Corpses recovered from space with several hundred cold damage and near-incinerated passengers with near a thousand heat damage are certainly recoverable, but it is up to you to decide if you have the time and materials necessary to revive them in any semblance of a timely manner. While topicals such as ointment treat all forms of heat damage, they do so slowly and have long do-after bars to provide that little bit of healing at a time. If you lack a Cryo setup (or have inexperienced chemists and lack the time / resources to help them make Cryo meds) it may take you several uninterrupted minutes and countless tubes of ointment to revive even one patient in this state.

This is not to say that you should never, ever treat them. Maybe the station is doing incredibly well and you have nothing better to be doing. Maybe Cargo gifted you a ton of topicals after you gave their Salvage team medical supplies to-go. Maybe the poor soul dragged in with over a thousand heat damage is the HoP or Captain. Whether or not you revive someone with incredibly time-consuming injuries is entirely at your discretion, and depending on the situation you will have your own rationales backing whichever decision you make.

Ultimately it is up to your judgement if reviving them is worth it.

Equipment

Some of these items are equipable in your loadout, and are in your inventory at round start. Otherwise they are usually found in your chief medical officer's locker.

Equipment
Item Description
Chief medical officer PDA Like all medical PDA's, comes pre-installed with a MedTek cartridge, giving your PDA health analyzer functionality.
MedTek cartridge A spare is in the chief medical officer's locker, granting health analyzer functionality to anyone's PDA.
Chief medical officer ID card Don't lose this.
Hypospray Instantly injects reagents and medicine, with a maximum capacity of 30 units. Some people will want to steal this item from you.
Medical door remote Allows you to change the settings of Medical doors. The remote can switch doors to emergency mode, toggle door bolts, and open/close doors from a distance.
Handheld crew monitor Functions the same as the crew monitoring console, but handheld! Your paramedic may ask for it to do their job better, or because they have an alternative very good reason.
Flash Like all command, you have a flash in your loadout. When used, it stuns and temporarily blinds those around you unless they have protective eye wear.
Chief medical officer's over-ear headset Allows you access to the Medical (:m), Command (:c), and Common (;) radio channels, but a cooler over-the-ear style.
Medical encryption key When put into a headset, allows access to the Medical (:m) radio channel.
Chief medical officer's rubber stamp For stamping official paperwork with your CMO approval.
Oxygen tank The same as any other standard oxygen tank.
Chief medical officer's hardsuit A hardsuit just for you! Provides major resistance to caustic damage. Slows your movement speed less than other hardsuits do.

Job-Specific Clothing

Clothing
Item Description
Chief medical officer's beret Looks sick. Comes free with your promotion.
Chief medical officer's cloak Example
Chief medical officer's cloak Example
Chief medical officer's jumpskirt Example
Chief medical officer's jumpsuit Example
Chief medical officer's lab coat Example
Chief medical officer's lab coat Example
Chief medical officer's mantle Example
Chief medical officer's turtleneck jumpskirt Example
Chief medical officer's turtleneck jumpsuit Example
Chief medical officer's winter coat Example

Important Notes/Recap

  • During any crisis that creates a massive amount of casualties, remember to prioritize who is healed first. Patients that are in critical condition are high priority, as if they may die if left unattended and reviving a dead crew mate is more resource intensive than not letting them die in the first place. Heal stable patients to get them out of your way and make them someone else's problem. Revive dead patients in order of current usefulness to the station. Security first if you're fighting Nuclear Operatives, Engineering first if there is a power crisis, etc..
  • Try not to let bodies rot! A body that "doesn't look very fresh" needs to be revived sooner than a fresh corpse, as reversing rotting requires use of Cryogenics (therefore requiring a functioning Cryopod) and some not inexpensive medicines from Chemistry.
  • The medical door remote is absolutely indispensable in a crisis. It allows you to make Medical doors all-access by setting them to emergency, saving you precious time opening doors for impatient tiders with papercuts when you could've instead been treating patients in crit.