[Discussion] Night shift radiology department.

[mikamurakaoru]

In real world hospital, night shift staff in some department (ex. radiology) is reduced or eliminated. To hire technologist to stand-by for CT scan at night that may not have single patient at all is inefficient. In small hospital, usually 1 technologist is shared between radiology department (s/he has to do all of radiology works). I think it's feasible if some staff can be shared between radiologist room, or at least if there're no staff for night shift in the department, patient should be notified beforehand and they should wait for (and not complain for lacking of) radiology examination until day.

[Cas]

Yeah I find this a bit frustrating as well - I feel having the technologists use an on call room similar to doctors would work far better for overnight radiology.
And is definitely more realistic where most hospitals only have a small number of on duty radiographers overnight/weekend, or even an on call radiographer.

[mikamurakaoru]

Originally posted by Dan:

Yeah I find this a bit frustrating as well - I feel having the technologists use an on call room similar to doctors would work far better for overnight radiology.
And is definitely more realistic where most hospitals only have a small number of on duty radiographers overnight/weekend, or even an on call radiographer.

+1 if sharing staff between room is impossible due to game mechanic. To have technologist on call room is the option that not break a game much.

[Cas]

Ye I’m not sure how they’ve set it up but setting the rooms to draw from an on call room (similar to diagnostic units in other departments) seems like it would be the easiest solution to implement without changing how rooms with allocated workspaces work at present.

[FragLeg]

Well, you can just re-assign the radiologist if necessary.

I'm not convinced that eliminating all "tough" choices makes the game more fun. Make up your mind if you want to spend the money of having a MRI running at night or not.

[Cas]

it’s just more of a realism thing - overnight most hospitals don’t fully staff their radiology departments, they’ll have a much smaller team on who can cover whichever room is needed.

[Oceansize]

In RL a night shift radiographer would need to be told ‘hey we need you over in CT right now, not X-ray.’ Which is what we’re doing when we’re micromanaging, lol.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t approve of a change similar to what you’re all discussing (on call room for radiographers), just playing devils advocate I guess. I’m sort of with FragLeg, I don’t want tough choices taken away from me. RL hospitals need to make sacrifices too.

[Cas]

That makes sense yes and the game does need choices, but it also needs to be careful not to become too micromanagey - maybe have different AI functions be toggled. The balance could be working out how many staff you need to ensure patients don’t wait long vs having too many staff in the on call room idle. But this would need more patients coming in overnight anyway.

If I’m meant to be the head of a full hospital then having to manually direct the work of one radiographer seems excessive.

If they could make it so you could choose how much you manage yourself this could be a good balance I guess. Whilst the hospital is small sure i’ll do it - when the hospital is bigger I should be able to delegate that kind of decision to the head of department (radiography should be able to have a head of department anyway!)

[Oceansize]

Yep that’s the major design challenge...the line between “too much” micromanaging and “just enough” is very tenuous.

I now have all departments up & running, right at the 200 employee cap, so I now know what my maximum workload feels like, and the cap means I am running two technologists and one radiographer lighter than I’d prefer.

As a result the micromanaging I’m doing involves reassigning my one night shift radiographer throughout the night as needed, and my one USG technologist between Cardio and GS as necessary. I’d prefer to avoid doing that, but it’s not too bad, and I know it won’t get worse since all depts are open now. So I am personally satisfied with the amount of micromanaging I’m doing, but that’s definitely a subjective thing.