McMurdo Station’s Hospital

Currently, McMurdo Station is hosting a little over 800 people in an industral, dangerous, busy town about as far away from anywhere as you can get. Naturally, with so many people, there’s the occassional sickness and injury. To deal with that, there’s a complete hospital and medical staff waiting to take care of any medical need. Here are a few pics from my recent tour of the McMurdo Station General Hospital…

The outside of the McMurdo Station, Antarctica general hospital. This contains the all of the medical facilities in McMurdo, and is located at the center of town, directly across from main building 155. Also visible is the firehouse just behind to the left.

On the back of the hospital is the ambulance loading ramp.

Outside of the hospital is a special housing for emergency Mass Casualty gear.

In the entrance area, there’s a wall of medical relics from past years in the hospital – interesting to see old field medical gear, and lots of military medical gear.

Including a portable field x-ray, seen in the cart on the right.

Stock room, with lots of medical supplies.

One of the coolest pieces of gear in the hospital is a hyperbaric chamber. This chamber can be used to increase the air pressure for somebody suffering from diving-related decompression illness, altitude related illness, or similar.

Looking inside the Hyperbaric chamber, it’s all setup and ready for one person to enter quickly in an emergency.

Physical therapy room. Although this room is not completely setup at the moment, it can be reconfigured to a compled PT gym.

McMurdo has 6 full hospital beds for extended stays, in addition to four trauma bays. The yellow arrows on the floor point the direction of flow for triage and patient processing during a mass casualty incident where there are more patients than the hospital can normally handle.

Ultrasound, and other high tech gear is all available at McMurdo.

One of the ward beds – quite a complete setup!

The hospital’s break room has all the ammenities needed for long shifts.

Although I couldn’t fully access the trauma bay because a patient was occupying one of the beds, here’s a quick shot of one of the corner trauma areas.