Tips

[Mikkelborg]

Hello. Any smart tips on how to start planning a hospital? I always think too big, or too small :P So any tips for a good starting point is appreciated :)

[Spud52]

Mikkelborg, This is not a tip since I've only been playing the game for about a week now. I'ts just my observation. In building each department I usually underestimate how much space I will need. With most things, it is better to go with to much than not enough. Hope this helps you out some.

[Spud52]

Almost forgot, With almost every room, one of the dimension will always be a 6, either length or width or both. What I have been doing in starting a department is to go to an exterior wall and count out six spaces from that wall and build a wall parallel to the exterior wall the entire length of that floor. That will give you a good template for most if not all of the rooms you will need in any given department. The '6', whether it is length or width will always be a constant.

[vonMoo]

Those are all good points by Spud52 and will get you started really well.

I'd add:

You can plan where you want rooms to go in management mode, by zoning them on the grass.

If you can, build out the foundation and outer walls for footprint of the whole hospital before adding a new floor. Adding a floor costs nothing, so this saves money in the long run but it does slow down the start of the game.

It's OK to spread departments across different floors, but there are some limits to what works. Try not to put the same type of room from a department on more than one floor, otherwise strange stuff can happen. And bare in mind that all rooms used by clinic patients need a waiting room on the same floor, so if you put X ray on 1 floor and CT on another, each will need its own waiting room. Spreading radiology across different floors works well though, you don't have to anticipate how many of each type of room you'll ultimately need.

Opening a night clinic allows you to have less strain on your clinic offices, because patients don't just go home at 1800. I usually do this once I get 40-50 patients, one doctor in each department at night is fine, but it's best to put 1 tech in all the different labs and radiology rooms (patients get fed up waiting the whole night for an X-ray or blood test). Ultimately, a night clinic allows you to have a few less clinic offices compared to what you'd need to diagnoses and treat every patient by 1800 (and you'll need one anyway).

Having an emergency department reception also helps put less strain on the clinic offices, as the receptionist saves time by finding a symptom or two for about half the patients.

You can dedicate radiology rooms, as well as sonography and cardiography rooms to accept only hospitalised or clinic patients, if you want. You do this on the staff cards for whoever works in that room. This can be useful in big hospitals. If you have 2 X-ray rooms dedicated to clinic patients, and 2 dedicated for hospitalised patients, each set can go on different floors.

The doctor mode insurance company, Oopsee corp., can provide some nice funds for building work.


Here's some fairly high level detail about planning

Patient numbers and distribution

With all objectives completed, each insurance company will give 26 patients. Depending on DLC owned, you can have either 3 or 4 active insurance companies, and therefor 78 to 104 patients. Half of them will be patients for the emergency clinic and the rest will be split between whatever specialised departments you have open (e.g. cardiology or general surgery), unless only emergency is open in which case they all go there, of course.

This actually means that if you have maxed out your insurance companies then opening new specialised departments will decrease the number of patients that each gets, and the amount of capacity needed in the first department you open will decrease quite a lot over time.


Numbers of clinic offices and beds to build

With all that said, space for about 10 - 12 emergency department offices should be fine, depending on how many insurance companies you want open. I have space for 12 in the hospital I'm building at the moment, and even with 4 insurance companies that should give me the capacity to deal with events, as long as I use good doctors, observation, etc.

Specialised departments generally need 2 or 3 clinic offices.

When building facilities for hospitalised patients, especially,observation, the trauma centre and ICU, a modular approach can be useful, where start with a space with a few beds and the necessary equipment and can add beds as needed. That avoids having to buy lots of expensive beds, life monitors, etc. before they are all needed. For me, starting with 4-6 observation beds and growing to 10-12 works well. Having 2 beds in the trauma centre at the start is fine, and adding 1 for each ambulance you want might be enough, but I always have space for a few more. My ICU grows from 2-4 beds up to 8-16, depending on if I want to open departments that attract less stable patients or not (cardio, neuro and traumatology make heavy use of the ICU).

Because of the way that patient numbers change depending on the number of departments open, I know that 12 ward beds and 12 HDU beds in my first department (general surgery, usually) may not be enough at the start. That depends on the number of ambulances I want, as each ambulance brings 3 HDU patients per day, split randomly across all departments open). But as I progress and open more departments, the number of beds needed will decrease and 12 in each should be a good amount. I design around this with my floorplan and some symmetry***...


Floorplan

I usually find the ground floor is good to build all of the emergency department, all the labs, and some of radiology (X-ray for the clinics to use, I'll have space for 3 or 4 rooms but may only need 2, so I can usually be flexible with the extra space later). Since I have the hospital services DLC I find the ground floor is great for a pharmacy, shop and cafeteria.

Having only one, central elevator can help avoid the AI doing strange pathfinding. A cluster of elevators at the same spot would work nicely too, if one wanted that as a visual aspect. Path length between the elevator and different facilities is important for how efficiently your staff can work and how well you'll be able to save lives. I've written about this before, but as a priority I like to put the following rooms nearer to the elevator than others,but they are spread out over many floors: trauma centre, ICU, ORs, CT for the hospitalised patients, labs, all nurses stations. The first 3 are about saving lives, the last 2 are about efficiency.

I dedicate a floor to house all my ORs (I have space for 8, but can expand to 10 if I need to), and also put ICU and some radiology there too (CT and MRI for hospital patients, usually). It doesn't really matter where this floor is, mine is the first floor.

Then each other floor fits 2 departments plus a few radiology rooms. *** This is how I plan for changing ward space. I open my first department in one half of a floor, and build extra ward and HDU beds in the spot where the second department on that floor will have the same rooms. So I can double the space that I've planned for that first department if needed. When I'm ready to open a second department I do it on a new floor, so the first department can keep the extra capacity. By the time I'm ready to open the third department, I can usually unzone the extra capacity in the first department and build the third department on that floor.


Other facilities

You'll eventually need more than one CT. CAG is only needed for cadio and neuro, but you will need at least 2 for cardio. 1 MRI room is fine. General surgery can make heavier use of diagnosis rooms than other departments, as dialysis happens there and takes a long time. The choice between building sonography and cardiography in the department or in radiology is interesting. If you have a sonar room in GS as well as one in radio, the game will try to send a patient to the GS room first. Some departments make very heavy use of these rooms; GS uses ultrasound quite a lot for kidney stones and similar, cardiology uses cardiography much more than other department. Even if you want to use generic radiology sonar and cardiography, it can be worth building these rooms near the relevant department.

[Mikkelborg]

Great tips, thanks! So then its my creativety and layout that needs to be sorted out, this should be fun :P I usally give up too easy, lol.

[Spud52]

You are right folks. I should have specified the difference between "Prefab rooms" and "Mimimum Requirements" of all rooms. I was "Only" referring to Prefab rooms. And as I pointed out, I've only been playing this game myself for only about a week. My bad!

[Spud52]

Bufu As we can agree, (hopefully) I was only referring to Prefab rooms, so I'm good with that. Having said that, and still referring only to Prefab rooms, it's not just my opinion, it is a fact that most Prefabs do have a dimension of 6 in them. Just remember, I said 'almost every room' still referring only to Prefab rooms, has a '6' dimension in them. In fact there are only 2 rooms in the entire Prefab section (and I am using only the generic game, no Mods) that do not have 6 in their dimensions, and they are 1) Corridor...it is 12 x 4...and 2) Waiting Room... it is 9 x 4. And since I failed to clarify the difference between Prefab and Minimum room requirements, I can easily see where you would assume that that was only my opinion, and draw the conclusion that you did. I probably would have drawn the same conclusion given that same information. We were/are talking about Apples and Oranges.

You obviously have been playing this game for a long time, and are very knowledgeable of it's workings. I on the other hand have only been playing this particular game for about a week. I started with Prefabs because it is so much quicker to build departments that way than doing them from scratch. I have completed all 9 departments with room to spare covering 4 floors. I always use the 'smallest' prefabs available when building my departments, and I do have a few hand built rooms sprinkled about. But mostly my hospital is Prefab. My next Hospital; I think I will build each department by hand, now that I have a rudimentary understanding of the game. My first Hospital, was the easy way. My next Hospital will be built with a lot more emphasis devoted to detail and a better understanding of the game. Until then thank you and vonMoo for your help and information.