Struggling with money tip

[Epicshorts]

I am on what I think is the first cold hospital where you can't hire experienced staff and was struggling with money even with loans, but I found something that was really helpful and thought I'd post it here. If you are struggling with money getting going, click on the money tab, then click overview, then click policy and lower your Diagnoses Threshold for Treatment slider down to 50% and also check the Fast-Track Treatment Decision box. Basically you will be sacrificing Reputatio because of wrong diagnoses but will earn money quicker cause they pay whether you get it right or not, which on this particular scenario is very helpful, as I need to be able to build stuff and train employees.

[ElPrezCBF]

I haven't played this hospital in quite some time although I have at least one star in all hospitals including all DLCs but Speedy Recovery. So I won't comment much on specifics but there are some things you should never do. Never lower your diagnosis threshold to 50% as that will greatly lower your chances of successful treatment, although enabling fast-track treatment is fine. The most I've lowered it to was 80% and only because it was a patient wave scenario.

A drop in reputation might seem negligible but in the long term, you get less patients and therefore less income. Some hospitals also have a reputation level objective that you cannot ignore.

I'm not saying you need to get a perfect reputation and depending on the hospital, there may be times when you need to turn away certain patients regularly and lose some reputation until you're able to treat them. Or deliberately turning away patients with rare diseases to avoid leveling up reputation too quickly and attracting too many patients too soon that will overwhelm your hospital. However, that's a far cry from lowering the diagnosis threshold to 50%.

You can take a loan but only if you're confident your hospital can repay it within a few months because of extra interest charges. Loans are only truly useful under this condition because you can use them to build new rooms to accommodate say emergencies (which if you succeed in them, will give you even more income as a reward) or build new training rooms to train staff in specialized skills. Never take a loan just because your treasury is in the red but you don't have enough reputation to attract enough patients quickly enough to repay it quickly.

Food, drink and game machines may not give much income per transaction but having enough spread across the hospital will mean an almost constant income stream especially when you have many patients, which again requires a high reputation, something you won't get from a 50% diagnosis threshold.

Don't go crazy on hiring. Although there's no hard and fast rule, I find that hiring one specialized staff more than the number of corresponding specialized rooms works well in the early to mid game (under level 10 hospital). In the late game, you'll be swimming in money so much that you can afford to hire more flexibly when needed.

[Diakonov]

You must give everything to medical and nurse staff, including very nice food machines but NEVER a raise. Give training, work, a nice eviroment, nice toilet and food and they will be grateful despite being poor.

You can raise their levels without raising their salary. They will be happy for being important and recognized despite being poor.

[wicked lester]

You can get around money issues by maxing out prices for treatment (only). The rep hit can be countered with marketing for a fraction of the extra money you are gaining and patients rarely refuse to pay.

[ElPrezCBF]

Originally posted by Hyrenapth:

You must give everything to medical and nurse staff, including very nice food machines but NEVER a raise. Give training, work, a nice eviroment, nice toilet and food and they will be grateful despite being poor.

You can raise their levels without raising their salary. They will be happy for being important and recognized despite being poor.

There's flexibility in how you want to make money since the game is quite forgiving. But you'll have to define "happy" because afaik, staff with neutral happiness do not have any work bonuses and you need to push it up to 80% for those bonuses to take effect.

If by "happy", you mean neutral, they will indeed become unhappy if their skill levels are way above their pay. You can only delay a pay rise up to a certain point, especially when they have the unhappy trait. There really isn't much you can do for staff happiness. But training and giving them a decent staff room with access to food and drink in most rooms and easy toilet access does the trick for most staff without the need for a cafeteria to keep them at least on neutral, unless they have the unhappy trait. I also find that raising their pay progressively with their skill level only when they start to become unhappy is still ok if you intend to keep them only on neutral since their skill level would push up reputation and hence patient numbers and income anyway.