Critical care

Critical care may refer to:

See also

Critical Care (journal)

Critical Care is an online open access peer-reviewed medical journal covering intensive-care medicine published by BioMed Central.

External links

Critical Care (Star Trek: Voyager)

"Critical Care" is the 151st episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the fifth episode of the seventh season. It has an average fan rating of 4.8/5 on the official Star Trek website as of September, 2009.

Plot

The Doctor's mobile emitter is stolen from Voyager by an alien trader named Gar and sold to an overcrowded hospital on a nearby planet run by Administer Chellick. When the Doctor is activated and told to get to work, he protests his kidnapping, but on seeing the number of patients, agrees to take on the duties of tending to them.

The Doctor quickly learns that this hospital is run in a strict manner by a computer called the Allocator, which assigns the staff of doctors and regulates doses of medicine to patients based on a Treatment Coefficient (TC) value assigned each patient based on a complex formula that includes the patient's value to society. One patient, Tebbis, has a terminal condition that requires cytoglobin which the hospital can provide, but Tebbis' TC is too low to allocate it. When the Doctor begins to question this, the Allocator assigns him to Level Blue. Level Blue's facilities are much cleaner and the patients given a greater amount of care. He learns the patients on this level have a much higher TC than those where Tebbis is warded, and that the Allocator prioritizes their prophylactic care over those lower-TC patients that need emergency care. The Doctor is able to convince the nurses to provide him with additional doses of cytogoblin which he smuggles to the lower level and treats Tebbis with. The Doctor continues this until Chellick discovers his scheme and restricts the Doctor to Level Blue.