A Medical Doctor's Experience Working on a Cruise Ship

To work while traveling has always been one of my dreams. I never imagined that the way I would actually manifest this dream would be as a cruise doctor. I had recently returned from a one week contract with Carnival Cruise Lines to help cover their physicians so that they could attend an annual medical conference on maritime medicine.

The trip began from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I got aboard the ship as many passengers were about to leave there the ship after completing their 7 days cruise. This ship began in San Juan and cruised the Western Caribbean and had multiple stops including Saint Lucia, Dominica, Saint Thomas, Antigua, and Barbados. I was joined by another physician from San Francisco and we had a staff of 3 nurses, who ironically were all from South Africa.

The role of the physician is to not only take care of the passengers during emergencies, but we were also the primary care physicians for the crew members, who were from all over the world and had all sorts of medical problems. This made creating a differential diagnosis tricking since you had to consider the origin of where they grew as part of the possible etiology for their illness.

The patients were relatively straightforward and the other physician and I would alternate days in the clinic and we would see approximately 10-15 patients per day, over a 7 hour work day. The nurses saw many patients on their own and could make the decision to treat without seeing the physician. This was much more liberal than one sees when practicing in the United States, however, I must admit that it was a model that I could appreciate considering how busy physicians are.