McCoy's Medical staff

[sbk1234]

Man, I was way off! By the title, I thought this was going to be some wierd topic about McCoy's "manhood."

 

[Kirby]

I'm figuring that most of the time not much is happening to require a lot of medical attention so a big medical staff would be a waste of resources. In cases where they're assembling a fleet to go into battle they probably can pick up additional medical resources know that they'll be needed.
When combat happens on the spur of the moment the existing staff is probably enhanced with crew members who have been trained as medics.

Think about M*A*S*H (Great pic Nerys!) they only had 4 or 5 doctors, depending on if you assume Spearchucker sticks around past the first season and a potentially infinate number of wounded. On the Enterprise, you're limited to a maximum number of wounded to 430 and if they're all wounded you've got much bigger problems.

 

[Red Ranger]

^Kirby: That kind of makes sense, but here's something you may be overlooking. By the nature of starship duty and the low number of crew members, many of the officers and crew have expertise in a number of areas. Take Sulu -- not only is he a helmsman, he's a botanist and astrophysicist.

So say there are M.D.s on board. Some could also double as research scientists, examining the life form readings landing parties bring back from their missions, giving them something to do when they aren't attending wounded or just providing regular checkups of the crew. After all, the department is called life sciences, as I recall.

 

[Shatinator]

Well, thanks for all the replys, this is very intresting. I enjoyed the speculation about the Enterprise-D, but I am most intrested in thoughts about Mccoys crew...

Man, I was way off! By the title, I thought this was going to be some wierd topic about McCoy's "manhood."




Now that was funny...

I appreciate the notion that many of the officers are highly trained in many areas, it seems to make more sense why sickbay seemed mostly empty much of the time. Still I'm not sure how it would work if for example Spock had to jump into Scotty's shoes for a while.

-The Shatinator

 

[Stompy]

On cruise ship's today there's usually only 1 doctor and a small staff.

430 people aren't a lot of patients to serve.

Ol' Country doctors used to serve towns of thousands.

 

[Anji]

Welcome back, Shatinator!

 

[Neopeius]

The Franz Josef blueprints list:

1 CMO
3 Doctors
1 Head nurse
21 Nurses
30 Medical Technicians

This doesn't seem excessive given that part of the Enterprise's mission is to relieve far out colonies. Many of these staffers probably also are conducting medical research of some kind.

Whenever I finish my Unsung Crewmen of the Enterprise project, we'll have a pretty good idea just who staffs the medical department

 

[sbk1234]

Does this muddy things up a bit? In Trials and Tribble-ations, Bashier identified himself to the old-Enterprise engineer as being a doctor. If the medical staff was that small, wouldn't everyone know who each of the doctors was?

 

[milo bloom]

Does this muddy things up a bit? In Trials and Tribble-ations, Bashier identified himself to the old-Enterprise engineer as being a doctor. If the medical staff was that small, wouldn't everyone know who each of the doctors was?

Not quite sure if I'm remembering the ep right, but if they had been at the station for at least a couple of hours, the engineer might have assumed Bashir was a new rotation from the station and not thought much about it.

Or he might have assumed Bashir was simply always on an opposite shift from him.