Ok, your hospital is overcrowded, here are some things that work for me:

* Right click through every patients. Sometimes you can skip the diagnoses and go directly for the cure.

* Send people home in overcrowded areas and try to fix the flow so that it won't happen again by building more buildings and receptions.

* Control the flow with max queue on each building. For example, a building that cures the patient probably shouldn't have a large queue, because the patient has already gone through diagnosis and waiting. A GP office far away might also get more patient for some reason, so lower the queue on those wherever it occurs.

* Never allow the receptionist to have a queue. Send people home and build more buildings to prevent it.

* Hire every consultant available and train your own consultants. It may take 1-3 years to train one but you need consultants later, and they won't be for hire when you need them. The price for a consultant might seem expensive, but it's not really. They'll make up for it, easily; you can safely hire them whenever they are available.

Building more receptions! Duh. I have never thought of that... :) I've built 3 or 4 GP offices, but I've always had just one reception. I'm definitely going to try that.
And I usually just skip the diagnoses on terminal patients...

Thanks for your tips!

In the later missions you often need 2 receptionists to handle the flow of patients, so that is a good start. You may also consider a GP or two in other parts of the hospital, so patients don't need to walk all the way back to the receptionist area.

Maybe you're doing this already, but in the start of the later missions it's a good practice to hire the consultants you see, because there won't be (m)any later on for hire. Then train up juniors to consultants, which work much faster. As long as they are kept happy they won't ask for a raise either, so you effectively have consultants working on junior wages. Consultants are more precise too, so patients don't have to go to the GP office as often to get correct diagnosis, shortening queues and increasing efficiency.

Consultants are key. You want your consultants as your GPs.

When you get training, sacrifice a consultant and whatever dr you have with the most specialties. Training is also where attention to detail (that bar with the magnifying glass) is really important, as well as with GP's and other Diagnoses physicians.

Train your DR with a specialty up to consultant and only hire low ranked DRs with other specialties. The idea here is that your new consultant will have a specialty that they can train your new hires with. So assume you train a JR with Pscych to a consultant. Then he can train a jr surgeon into a consultant psych/surgeon. Researchers are important as well, but prioritize your other DRs because a couple researchers will do their job regardless of their ability, it's just a matter of how quickly they will do it.

Now you will hopefully eventually have a high attention to detail consultant researcher/psych/surgeon.

Hire only JRs. Mass hire and fire those with no attention to detail (less than half) attention to detail means they learn faster. This is largely a patience game...but when you have a staff of about 8 consultant researcher/psych/surgeons, you can run an entire hospital with very few staff...

Aside from that. There are time when it is appropriate to "close for renovations" Since initially, the hospital should be built kind of in a piece-meal fashion, to keep it compact. Set the game speed to 1 and send EVERYBODY home. FIgure out what parts of your hospital need to be more efficient and rebuild them after gutting them completely. Short term this will cost you some money but if your hospital is big enough to need this cash flow shouldn't be a problem. Take out a loan if you need to. Remember that if you aren't overstaffed, your clinic rooms don't need to be anything special as doctors won't be stuck in them very long. If you are overstaffed, then Dr.s won't be called to other rooms very frequently.

Look through your cure statistics. Each level seems to have a prevalence of certain illnesses. Build identical rooms next to each other and have centralized seating sections.

Sometimes it's helpful to re-queue everyone in an area by sending them all to reception. They will naturally return and sit closer to the room they need to attend. Otherwise they will pick the closest seating option, which could be across the hospital.

Many washrooms, make them small-ish (3 toilets max) to reduce travel time. Also multiple staff rooms and fatigue to only 40%

It's also a good idea to manually remove doctors from rooms if you see them sitting there and there's no expected queue.

Room efficiency.

A GP will always get up from his seat on the same side. Place your file cabinet facing the seat on that side, or, directly behind the seat. Place the patient's chair right next to the room...pay very close attention to all the room animations and set them up so that your staff and patients have to travel as little as possible.

Set your policy to increase/decrease the percentage of the diagnosis process, this way you keep your patients away from you GP offices a bit longer and moving throughout the hospital. Though you will need to keep an eye out for terminal patients (if you don't stand a chance, send them to research or send them to another hospital/home)

I can't think of anything else off the top of my head.

Thanks for the tips, some of them I have never tried before :)


Set your policy to increase/decrease the percentage of the diagnosis process, this way you keep your patients away from you GP offices a bit longer and moving throughout the hospital. Though you will need to keep an eye out for terminal patients (if you don't stand a chance, send them to research or send them to another hospital/home)

How do you do this?

I'm not sure, but if you can't treat everyone that comes through your doors, I suggest rethinking some fundamentals about serving the community and the customer, as it is a business game.