The procedures for dealing with medical emergencies aboard starships and starbases have been adapted for use on Deep Space 9. The relative proportion of trained medical crew to potential patients is much smaller than that on a typical starship, which would make a station-wide catastrophe difficult to manage. However, at least 20% of the combined Starfleet-Bajoran crew have been cross-trained for various secondary assignments in emergency medical, triage, and other disaster-response functions.

     During most predicted station-wide emergencies, all 10 staff physicians, 9 medical technicians, and 20 nurses would be called up to form the initial rapid-response medical team.

     Rotations of staff members and cross-trained crew would be initialed after the first 15 hours. All contingency medical stations in the Habitat Ring will be activated by medical department personnel and placed on alert status

     Each contingency medical station contains what amounts to a smaller scale copy of the Infirmary, with limitations on specialized surgical hardware and amounts of standard supplies. Medical tricorders and small overhead sensor clusters provide rapid comprehensive scanning capabilities, and the collected data can be fed to semiautomeated diagnostic and treatment gear.

     The most compact emergency care system is portable medical kit. Also adapted from standard-issue starship medical gear, the medkit is equipped to perform scanning, diagnostic, and treatment functions, plus database management and computer interface operations. The medkit normally contains one medical tricorder, two multimode hyposprays, one dermal regenerator, one blood infuser, one defibrillator, one PADD, and one neural stimulator. The case also houses a variety on injectable fluids, bandages, device packages, 6.5 kiloquad isolinear processor, and subspace transceiver assembly.