Medical Needs on Ship

If your fictional ship won’t have readily accessible off ship medical aid, they’ll need all the capabilities a modern ER which means the abilities to do blood work and tests like X-rays or MRIs to diagnose problems and medicine on hand to help most basic problems. Having medicines and vaccines on ship will mean having storage on ship so besides the storage for normal medical things like sterile gauzes and whatever syringes are used by your people you’ll also have to keep a room ready for liquid medicine to stay safe over long periods of time which means some version of refrigerator or freezer as well as a device to warm up the medicine before injecting it into the warm bloodstream. You will also need to be able to diagnose things such as radiation problems, pregnancies, STDs, nerve problems, possible chemical imbalances, or alien diseases. In many shows, such as the Star Trek franchise, people can be diagnosed by merely putting them in a tube or running a scanner over them. You could always get away with just putting people in tubes that diagnose and heal them by computer but what if there is a glitch in the programming or the person has something so rare the computer isn’t programmed to look for? It’s always smart to have at least one doctor onboard or at the very least a nurse who can easily consult with a doctor over interstellar communications.
If your ship is expected to be deployed for months at a time with no or little trusted medical aid nearby it would be smart to have a way for the doctors to grow their own medicine. The doctor in the series Enterprise travelled with a menagerie of animals from all over the known universe and he used their blood or excrement or skin or venom to heal the humans. Various episodes have shown the doctors on ship needing to grow bacteria or plants for medicines so it could be best to have a sterile room or area with optimal or adjustable light to grow things. Also there will need to be a lot of database space for medical research, historical data, and species biology needed to diagnose lesser known diseases as well as technology to diagnose new diseases your crewmembers may pick up from alien species. You’ll also need surgical capabilities, whether that means putting them in a tube or bed for a few hours so the computer can fix them or having a sterile room and a few doctors and nurses trained to do the hands on version. Another thing to keep in mind is pregnancies and the reproductive health of your crew. Although you could make it mandatory that the crew takes birth control pills or shots, which will need to be taken on schedule for everyone and dispensed every few weeks or months, your doctor would likely still need to be ready to deal with STIs from alien species or dormant ones from crewmembers. If you make such measures optional than there is the possibility of pregnancies onboard and if you are too far away to safely send the mother to off ship medical facilities for the duration than your doctor will need to be able to give her the medicine and checkups needed both before and after birth. Luckily a normal sterile medical bed can be adjusted for the birth and any checkups. In fact, most of the things in medical and on ship can be adjusted to do many things. You should just know most of the uses of the things on your ship.