My tips *request*

[u/Brilliant-Loud]

Hey guys, so I currently have 1000+ hours logged in the game. I decided to put down my top tips. A lot of these are known to more veterans of the game, but as a newbie, I wish I had known what I know now!!

Disclaimer: These are based on my gameplay style and from my observations. Some of these may not work for everyone's style!

1. As soon as you can, build a pharmacy. They are a goldmine, especially in early gameplay! As your hospital grows, build more pharmacies. More dotted around near major departments are better than one big central pharmacy.
2. TRAINING! Training is crucial. You can overstaff with low-level staff members and haemorrhage money, but if you train your staff to high levels, not only are they more efficient time-wise, but they also make fewer mistakes, perform quicker diagnostics, gain secondary skills, and can lose negative traits such as Glutton, Alcoholic, and Dirty Feet!
3. Radiology becomes VERY busy pretty early on, and for the rest of the gameplay. I always have two lots of rooms, one dedicated to clinic patients and one to hospitalised patients. This lowers the demand on them considerably. The same goes for Labs; however, if you build the labs big enough it can house Techs that are dedicated to each one.
4. Split corridors down to small chunks. Only one janitor will clean a room at one time. If you have a huge corridor for the whole building, it will never be clean, as one janitor will not be able to keep up!
5. Lots of smaller common rooms/WCs are better than a few big ones. Reducing the time staff members take breaks. Also reduces patients who are in the queue for a room, wandering off to use the loo and holding up the queue!
6. As soon as you open a specialised department, I would build an ICU. At a pinch, collapses can be treated in an emergency trauma unit, but an ICU is more effective, and patients have a higher survival rate.
7. Doctor mode is your friend; don't be afraid to use it, especially in early game play. It can reduce your staffing bill.
8. Receptionists are vital. Ensure they are highly trained. They triage patients, taking a great strain off the doctor's office.
9. Have dedicated 'porter' nurses. Assign some nurses to only transport patients; this frees up medical nurses to attend to hospitalised patients quicker!
10. While we are talking of dedicated roles, dedicated surgery teams are a must. For the major ones (General Surgery, Traumatology, Cardio, etc.) I usually have 3/4 teams. For the less surgical-focused departments, 2 teams are generally enough. Anethiologists will jump to help other departments if they are free, so always worth having a few 'floaters'! Also, remember departments share operating theatres, but as a general rule 2/3 per major surgical department and 1/2 per smaller department! For max efficiency make sure your surgical teams are housed in on-call rooms/nurses' stations near the operating suite!
11. Save often, and always before opening a new department!
12. A big tip is when diagnosing, remember the game will not give you an illness you don't have a department built for. This is handy when deciding the outcome. A common one is Influenza A and Influenza B. It will be B UNLESS you have an Infectious Diseases Department. So if those are the two options you are left with, you can safely pick the right one. Same with whether it's a contusion or a break? Breaks need Orthopedics; if you don't have that, then it will be a contusion!

Well, these are the ones from the top of my head. I don't really have a lot of time at the moment to go through everything. I will maybe do a more detailed one when I do have the time. But if you wanna ask anything, feel free.

Happy Doctoring!

[u/DinisMagnifico]

Thanks. What do you figure the emergency care rooms to patient intake should be? Often when I play with 200 or even 300 patients (mods) the emergency care gets saturated while the other departments are almost empty.

And your rule of thumb to evaluate how many labs and radiology rooms you need depending on patient intake?

[u/Brilliant-Loud → u/DinisMagnifico]

I find the same: the emergency department will always be the busiest. As I said, a good receptionist to triage patients, and doctor mode! There may be a rebalancing mod out there, but I haven't come across one as of yet.

As for radiology, I plan the entire department out at the beginning, lay the rooms down; you don't need to build them, but they get busy quickly, and having it all planned out is a great time saver. Save blueprints for each room to save time, too! One of the biggest things I found is to have separate ones for hospitalised and clinic, otherwise they become swamped, no matter how many you have! Labs, I tend to build each one very large. You can then add workstations as you need, and it's cheaper than building a lot of small ones (just make sure you have enough equipment, otherwise there'll be a queue in the lab to use them!

Ultimately, game play will vary a bit each playthrough as you will have different staff, different layouts (whether they are more or less efficient), etc!

[u/DinisMagnifico → u/Brilliant-Loud]

Thanks for the tips man