I have a Chirugeon in my group with Medicae at Rank 2. He's really pretty good at first aid.

I've been going over the extended care rules and from what I read, it seems that it's more beneficial (i.e. you heal faster, especially when critically wounded) to just get first aid and wait for 24 hours in between attempts. This doesn't seem right, there should be a limit. It would be fairly easy to house rule but if going by RAW it certainly seems that way. What am I missing?

Thanks

Well for first sight it can be better, but read carefuly first-aid and extended care. Do you see that there are no penalty for being heavy or critical wounded in extended care?

So that is the difference... if it is not enough, well, you can forbid make first-aid tests for character , who already had been helped with firts-aid untill he will recover to light wounded. That's my thought for example.....

Base it is not better for critically and heavily injured characters because first aid suffers -10 for being heavily wounded and -10 for each point of critical damage the target has while extended care doesn't suffer these penalties and in fact gets a bonus +10. Extended care also lets you treat multiple patients at once with a single roll. However for characters with the chirurgeon role first aid can be better since they can spend fate to auto pass. Also once a character has the superior chirurgeon talent you are right first aid is pretty much always better. Although a character who has higher toughness than the doctor has intelligence and hardy may actually heal faster with extended care since the double natural heal rate will be better added to the degrees of success for healing than the doc's intelligence bonus.

So basically the best use of extended care is for mediocre doctors to get a character out of criticals without having to deal with crippling medicae penalties but with a risk of killing them.

Huh. Interesting. Definitely something to bring up with the GM about house-ruling. I'd say that a first aid attempt can only be made once "per injury" and only within 12 (or even less) hours of receiving the injury. That means, after a fight you can get first aid once, but the next day you can't do it again, the wounds don't need first aid, they need long-term care.

There's some fiddliness with "per injury" and if you got into two fights, you'd need to make sure that First Aid from the second fight didn't heal more than any damage actually taken. :-p

In our games, we found that this was an issue and ruled that critical damage is only removed by Extended Care. If you aren't critically wounded, first aid can probably fix all of your issues, but crits stick. We do reset the critical tracker on fate burn.