Sharing rooms

[Ulfberht]

Can´t find a way of sharing rooms. I´m very new to the game. When I build the emergency stuff, there is a common room and a cleaning room. Everything is in place.

Is there a way of other wards using the same common room and cleaning? Seems weird if I have to give every ward everything (new common room etc). There must be a way of letting multiple wards sharing a common room?
Please help :)

[Jaym]

Staff from nearby departments will use another's common room if they don't have their own. Also janitors will clean other departments' areas if they have spare time and have fully taken care of their own areas. However they will always give their own departments priority.

[Fredashay]

You can't share rooms, despite what the game says. I had the same problem when I started playing. The game has a huge learning curve, and the tutorial is useless, so don't feel bad.
Basically, each department is like its own separate hospital in itself, or at least that's how you have to think of it. Once I understood that, I built each department in its own separate building with each its own reception, waiting room, janitor room, etc. Each department needs to have all the rooms that belong to it. To verify you did this right, pick a department and click on the three gears -- you should see all the rooms in the selected department all colored up, and all the other departments grayed out. Do this for all your departments in turn to make sure you have all the rooms in all your departments active and all in close proximity to themselves. Hope this helps.

[ams083]

Originally posted by Fredashay:

You can't share rooms, despite what the game says. I had the same problem when I started playing. The game has a huge learning curve, and the tutorial is useless, so don't feel bad.
Basically, each department is like its own separate hospital in itself, or at least that's how you have to think of it. Once I understood that, I built each department in its own separate building with each its own reception, waiting room, janitor room, etc. Each department needs to have all the rooms that belong to it. To verify you did this right, pick a department and click on the three gears -- you should see all the rooms in the selected department all colored up, and all the other departments grayed out. Do this for all your departments in turn to make sure you have all the rooms in all your departments active and all in close proximity to themselves. Hope this helps.

There are shared rooms that work just fine.

[Ulfberht]

My medical labs go to the commonroom built under emergency, so they seem to share, although its not explained anywhere...

Few other questions:
1. Some patients skip reception and go straight to waiting room. Working as intended? Is the game simulating that some patients just dont want to reveal their illnesses?
2. If I zone a corridor in emergency mode, patients can reach my labs, which are a bit down from the doctors offices. If I zone the same area in medical labs mode or whatever, then pateints cant reach waiting area in labs. I assume I have to have all areas zoned, and not blacked out due to cleaning? Does the janitors clean "black" zones?
3. Can you have several scientists woring in the same room at day? For example 2 PC and two chairs and then hire two that speeds up the queing?

[Fredashay]

Yeah, staff will sometimes go to bathrooms and staff rooms in the "wrong" department, and that's fine. But it's my experience with the game that if you build a department that doesn't have ALL the rooms present, and connected together by corridors assigned to that department, there will be problems with the game logic. Like I said, I solved that problem by building my hospital with each department in its own separate individual building on that lot (I built a floating lot in the sky with a central elevator core -- violates the laws of physics but it works, lol), and giving each department ALL its rooms, and if staff want to use toilets and staff rooms in other departments, just let them. It's funny watching them wheel patients outside down the sidewalk on stretchers to other departments (especially when it's raining), but it works, lol.

[Ulfberht]

Originally posted by Fredashay:

Yeah, staff will sometimes go to bathrooms and staff rooms in the "wrong" department, and that's fine. But it's my experience with the game that if you build a department that doesn't have ALL the rooms present, and connected together by corridors assigned to that department, there will be problems with the game logic. Like I said, I solved that problem by building my hospital with each department in its own separate individual building on that lot (I built a floating lot in the sky with a central elevator core -- violates the laws of physics but it works, lol), and giving each department ALL its rooms, and if staff want to use toilets and staff rooms in other departments, just let them. It's funny watching them wheel patients outside down the sidewalk on stretchers to other departments (especially when it's raining), but it works, lol.

I get that. Just me trying to learn the game and maybe build a hospital with some overlaps here and there. There should be an option of allowing patients across any department. For corridors at least :)

[Fredashay]

That's what I did when I built my very first hospital. I put a registration desk at the front door, an ER by the ambulance entrance, then the ORs, then a PACU after that, and a bunch of semi-private patient rooms on the floors above, all without regard to department ownership of each room, and the hospital was totally broken. It was then I realized that each department is a self-contained entity, and need to be built as such. Unfortunately, that's how the game works.

[Maarten]

A) You can NOT share rooms like Reception, Waiting Rooms, Doctor's Office, Radiology Rooms, Laboratories, ICU, Trauma Center, Observation Room, HDU, Regular Ward, Cleaning Closet, ... they belong to a department and they can't be used by another department.

Rooms that can be shared are shown under a 'shared rooms' header in the department overview.
Those are: Common Room, Restroom, Corridor, Elevator Planning and Operating Room.

- Common Room: staff prefer a common room of their own department, even if it is on the other side of the floor/hospital. So if you build emergency with common room + medical laboratories without common room, the lab staff will use the common room of emergency. But from the moment you give medical laboratories its own common room they start using that. Even if there is a, closer, common room from another department next to a lab. I would recommend to give a department no common room if you want that its staff uses the common rooms of other departments.

- Restrooms: patients don't care about departments, in this case, and use the closest restroom available. Staff on the other hand prefer the restrooms of their own department just like the common rooms.

- Corridors are there for zoning your empty space to a department. This is important for cleaning. Janitors clean their own department before they clean rooms from other departments. Unzoned areas are given the lowest priority and are cleaned only if the janitors have time after cleaning their own department and all others.

For example: a janitor of emergency cleans the rooms zoned in the emergency department before cleaning zoned rooms of other departments. All areas that are not zoned will only be cleaned when there is time left.

That's why it is important to allocate unzoned areas as a corridor to a department. Corridors are shared and are used by all staff and patients as they need to pass through.

- Elevator planning: this is for planning purposes only.

- Operating Rooms: like common rooms and restrooms, the staff prefer to use one from their own department. They use an operating room from another department if their department doesn't have one.


B) Receptions: only medium or high hazard patients go to a reception. The low hazard patients go straight to the waiting room.

C) You can't expand rooms like offices or radiology rooms: they only support one staff member.

You CAN expand rooms like medical labs, nurses station, on-call rooms,... by putting a desk/lab cabinet, chair and pc for each staff member.
You CAN expand wards by putting an extra bed + some required items (like bedside table, life monitor,...) for each extra patient