Consultant GP's
Placing a consultant in the first GP's office that a patient visits will help keep
the number of diagnosis rooms down. The consultant almost always identifies the
disease. If the consultant fails then the patient is usually sent to the ward (built
to support the operating theatre) or psychiatry (a diagnosis and cure room in
it's own right).
When a patient needs an extra diagnosis room, you can either build it, or
take a risk on the identification percentage.
Your research effort can now concentrate primarily on creating cure rooms,
instead of extra diagnosis rooms.
Allow for growth
Design your hospital with expansion in mind. By standardizing room size and/or
thinking ahead you can make the transition to higher numbers of patients.
Your initial hospital will be quite small, one or two GP's offices,
one or two diagnosis rooms, a pharmacy or two, one or two cure rooms and
a waiting area. If these start in a small cluster in a single plot of land
you will have an efficient but small hospital.
As your finances grow you can move some diagnosis rooms and cure rooms
out to other plots of land, the gaps they leave empty in the early design
can easily become a GP's surgery, toilet, or part of an expanding waiting
area.
Separate patients by diagnosis
A larger hospital requires an overall strategy right from the start. As
you gain experience in hospital design you should be able to see what the
final hospital will look like and take steps to build towards it.
Good hospital design is based around the distinct steps that patients
follow:
-
Initial consultation
-
Additional diagnosis followed by a further consultation
-
Cure
Perhaps the best strategy is to separate patients out as quickly as possible.
The initial consult area should really only be used once by a patient.
Consisting of 2-5 GP's offices (depending on the size of the level) it
should also have quite a large waiting area. Each of the offices should
have the door about the same distance from the centre of the waiting area,
patients will not then prefer the nearest office over others. Place your
best doctors in this area to keep consult times short and reduce the burden
on diagnosis rooms.
By buying plots of land and putting several diagnosis rooms in them
you pull patients out of the initial consultation area. Placing another
GP's office in this same plot keeps patients from returning to the initial
consult area. Don't forget to place another waiting area (and toilets!)
around this set of rooms as well. You don't have to put all diagnosis rooms
in the same area, this can be used to further split up patients.
Placing your cure rooms in another plot of land keeps the fully diagnosed
patients out of the way. Once cured, patients don't care how far they walk
to get out of your hospital, so it makes sense to place cure rooms far away
from your entrance.
The main weakness to this is the handling of emergencies,
though multiple cure rooms can make up for this in the later stages of
a level. Perhaps the best compromise is to build your cure rooms in the middle
of the hospital, and your diagnosis rooms in the furthest plots of land. This
works particularly well with your best doctors in the first GP office the
patient visits.
Surgical plot
A plot of land dedicated to surgery usually works well. Space for one
(or two) surgical theatres, a ward, and a waiting area is usually quite
stable. If this is your only ward then a nearby GP's office to handle diagnosed
patients might also be useful, you can rely on PA announcements to find
out when it needs to be used.
Pharmacy cures
More than one pharmacy placed near the hospital entrance (or emergency
helipad) will help you deal with potion cures and most emergencies.
Turn off rooms
When you have few patients in the hospital, turn off some your duplicate
rooms by setting the queue size to zero. This will force patients to use
one room until the queue is too large; patients will then automatically
queue for the second room. You reduce the number of doctors/nurses running
between rooms and get notification (via the PA announcement) that you have
a queue building up.
Works particularly well with rooms run by nurses, and you get an opportunity
to rest some weary staff.
Diagnosis control
Not all of the diagnosis rooms need to be built. Later levels give you a large
selection of rooms to build, but if the right room is not available then
the doctor will send the patient to the best alternative.
Core diagnosis rooms are: scanner, X-ray, psychiatry, ward and general
diagnosis. The rest are used less frequently, or take too long to operate.
By building the additional types of diagnosis rooms you can reduce the
load on the core types. Additional doctors are usually required to carry
the burden of the extra number and type of rooms. Minimize the number of
diagnosis rooms by using the consultant GP strategy above,
and a general diagnosis room will cover most diseases.
Balance cure and diagnosis rooms
Getting the balance between building new diagnosis or cure rooms is crucial.
Too few diagnosis rooms and you can't identify diseases to get patients cured.
It is suggested that the first new room researched that you build is a diagnostic
room. At least you will get the money from the extra diagnosis charge, even if you
can't give a cure.
See the consultant GP strategy above for a way of
biasing construction towards cure rooms.
Choice, choice, choice
You may gain some benefit by building 'island' rooms that have corridors around
them on all sides. Patients then have a choice on the shortest path to their target,
and if the path is too long then you don't get the money off of them so quickly.
Particularly useful when you have a smaller hospital to manage,
or in the first year or two of a later level.
Getting into debt
How much should you borrow? The maximum amount is about 40 percent of the value
of the hospital. It is better to borrow less than this and build up the best
hospital you can for attracting patients. The unused amount can be used as a reserve
should you have cash flow problems.
Be warned, get the balance between staff costs and income from patients wrong and you
will steadily lose money. Watch the monthly update on the chart page (press F5). You
should aim to at least balance even over a three month period (without relying on income
from emergencies). Profit will come from those periods where there are a large number of patients
in the hospital. You can get a large bonus of >10k at the end of the year if you've
done well, on top of the emergencies and epidemics that you handled.
Arterial flow
Try and keep your main corridors three squares wide. This will help the flow of patients and
staff in both directions. There should only be one row of chairs in a main corridor, try
and build waiting areas in dead ends so that patients don't need to walk through them to get to
other rooms in the hospital.
Epidemic control
It appears that the best way to reduce the number of epidemics you have is to make sure
queuing patients are kept away from patients walking past them.
Try building a waiting area in a dead end. If you can't do that then place benches to
make a U shape around the room entrance - only patients wanting to enter/leave the room will walk
past those sitting in the queue.
Slow motion construction
A top tip from Ashley Kissock to help you get your hospital
built up:
To extend your building time before opening
your hospital: run the game on slowest whilst building and then
return it to normal after you've finished.
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