I´ve finally completed the entire game without any kind of cheats, and without failing too much. If you are having trouble beating it, here´s many tips to help you:


THE BEGINNING

Personally, the worst part of the game is the beginning, when you need everything, you still don´t have anything, and reputation can make you fail really quick. You must focus on getting all the necessary rooms and personal in the less time possible, and you should always try to open the hospital before the deadline. Tips for this part:

1) Always start putting the speed of the game on slowest. It really helps because you can complete the hospital and open on February. Not doing so will make you open the hospital the latest possible and without all rooms, so always change the speed on the beginning.

2) Start hiring personal. Always start with medics, getting all the specialists, psychiatrists, researchers and surgeons you can. Don´t get more than 3 specialists, 2 psychiatrists, 3 researchers or 3 surgeons, as you will start having money problems, so if you hire too much personal you will fail. Try not to get juniors, you won´t be able to teach them and pay the rest of the personal in the later levels.

3) Once you have all the best medics you can, focus on 2 best nurses (if they aren´t good enough, pick only one), all the best janitors you can, and the best recepcionist. Try not to hire bad people, as you won´t be able to upgrade this kind of personal.

4) After hiring the best you can, start right away getting another land to grew your hospital. This is a good time to get the best loan you can (get as much as you can).

5) Build the research room, with at least two desks, and put all your researchers there.

6) Put heaters at maximum and change the research %. I usually put 5% at the last three options, and everything remaining on diagnostics.

7) Now start with the offices, diagnostic room, etc. You should have plenty of time to get one room of everything and two offices. Always make a big nursery (4-5 beds), put a heater on every room (two if the room is big), a plant and a bin. Put libraries and skeletons in the rooms where they are available (at least 1 of each). You should always make small toilets (5-6 at each room), but in every piece of land (I would recommend at least one near the offices and one near the surgery). Try to make a big personal room, you will fail if you haven´t got this early enough. The only room you shouldn´t make is the training room, don´t bother with that one yet.

8) If you are fast enough, it won´t be 31th of January yet. Focus on putting plenty of seats near the rooms, heaters in every spot so you cover the entire heat map, and drinking machines as close as you can at both rooms and seats. This is REALLY IMPORTANT, as patients work as this: Go to nearest seat at the room they are going to enter, if they want to drink, go to the nearest drinking machine, and then they go TO THE NEAREST SEAT TO THAT DRINKING MACHINE. That means if you have a drinking machine far from rooms, they will seat far from the room, making everything slower and becoming a huge problem, specially on later levels. It´s better to have too many drinking machines than having a few.

9) Now, it should February. Go again to hire new personal, looking specially for all kind of medics you don´t have yet, the extra nurse if you didn´t hire her, and again, all janitors you see good enough. After hiring all of them, put the reception and open right away your hospital. That´s important too, as the worst problem in the first year is reputation AND money. You must get patients as soon as you can, so they start giving you both money and reputation before the end of the year. In the latest levels, if you don´t do the beginning right, you will lose once you reach 31th of December.


THE FIRST YEAR

Now you have the hospital opened, but you still miss plenty of rooms that must be researched, you will probably still have personal trouble (not enough surgeons, not a psychiatrist, maybe few janitors...), and you will be low on money. Now it´s a race of getting enough money and reputations to survive the first year. Tips for this part:

1) Go again to the bank to raise your bank loan. I´ve found is better to have a $50.000 bank loan that not having one and just having 100$ money. You can lose the game if you haven´t got the loan, so always have as much money borrowed as you can.

2) Put the medics on the best rooms you can, trying to put specialists on offices, and psychiatrists and surgeons in their rooms.

3) You can now put the speed back on normal if you want.

4) Focus on looking at the kind of patients you start getting. If you have built everything and you have each kind of medic and nurses, you shouldn´t have any question mark faxes in the beginning, but you will start getting them sooner than you expect. Look at which kind of patients they are, and focus on getting their rooms first. Send to research every patient you can. Build only those rooms patients seem to need. Build the X-Ray room as soon as you can, but don´t build yet any other diagnostic room, they are expensive and you need money too. If you can´t send a patient to research, and you don´t have their rooms available (or they are just one patient for an expensive room), just send them home. This will lower your reputation, but you shouldn´t have many patients of this kind on the first year.

5) Have a look here and there at every machine room, specially the cardiology room. Repair any room with more than 4 damage, unless it has 11+ resistance (then wait until 5 damage).

6) Take a look here and there at hiring the personal you need. Get as many janitors you can (you should have the same number or more than all your medics), unless you are getting low on money. If that´s the case, wait for the second or third year to hire them. Don´t get more than two nurses in the first two years. Focus on getting at least 2 psychiatrists, 2 specialists, 3 surgeons, and if you don´t have them yet, 2 researchers.

7) At this part, stop spending money. Your reputation should go up, as there shouldn´t be many patients you can´t get a diagnostic, and there shouldn´t be many patients which need rooms you don´t have yet. You will heal enough patients to raise you reputation, so your next problem will be making each month enough money to pay all your personal.

8) This is where emergencies and epidemies are helpful. Try to get every emergency you can, unless you don´t have the room needed and you can´t build it, you don´t have the required personal, or the number of patients is too high for healing all of them. Try to hide every epidemy you can. If you can heal all of the patients of the epidemy, you can send them home and you won´t be found guilty. With the money of the emergencies and epidemies, you should have enough to survive the first year. Don´t forget to take as much bank loan as you can.


I will continue with these tips if people find them helpful :)

I got to the last level tonight without much trouble and while I agree with most of your tips, there are a few I find questionable:

If you don't buy plants (never found much use for them) you certainly don't need as many handymen as you suggest. At the end of a level when my hospital is big and crowded, I can get by with about 5 or 6; at the beginning of a level, you won't need more than 2. Just make sure they're highly skilled so they can do their work very fast.

Also, while I do use a loan every now and then, it's nowhere near 50.000. Mostly, it's about 10.000 early on to afford some expensive room like surgery. The one level I once failed was because my starting loan was way too high and the interest made me go bankrupt because the initial low level of visitors couldn't compensate for it.

Putting heaters all over the place and setting them to maximum is a very big waste of money. I usually turn the heater setting up one notch from it's standard setting and then space heaters around every 4 blocks. This way, they overlap each other and give me an above average warmth satisfaction with the patients.

Sending all your untreatable patients to the research room results in fatalities very soon, which will cause your popularity to plummet, thus failing the level. I use it very rarely; often I just make my patients wait a little.

Your tips regarding drinking machine placement, using emergencies and epidemics to your advantage, and time controls at the start of the game are very good.

Some additional tips of my own

Get a training room at the start of a level, hire a consultant with surgery and / or psychiatry skills and two or three of the cheapest juniors you can find and place them all in the room. This is a very good longterm strategy as you'll get more of those rare surgeons and psychiatrists which you will crave soon, they will be very fast when they reach consultant level and best of all, their salary will remain very low, saving you tons of money. Every time one reaches consultant level, I hire a new junior doctor to replace him in the training room, building up a nice army of excellent personnel from the get go.

Make sure your hospital has a logical lay-out. Put all your diagnosis rooms together at the start of your hospital, place treatment rooms and clinics in other areas. Make sure you leave room for additional GP's, as you'll need a minimum of 3 later on when things get really busy. Try to place a toilet and staff room in each area of your hospital later on, as this will minimize the amount of walking about patients and staff will have to do, thus optimizing your efficiency.

Put the percentage for when staff will go to relax to about 40% early on, and 25% later. This will assure that they will never get angry and stressed. Unhappy personnel constantly asks for pay raises which will drain your coffers fast. Check the staff roster often and pay unhappy staff (happens in very busy times) a bonus to prevent them asking for a raise.

Disable all research except diagnosis and cure rooms ( 50 / 50 both) at the start of a level. When these are fully researched, proceed to drugs and finally improvements. I never bother with specialisation.

Don't bother with plants. Handymen take forever trying to water them all which detracts them from important stuff like reparing your machines and keeping your hospital clean and healthy. I'm doing just fine without 'em.

There's probably more which I can't think of right now. Anyway, I think these and a lot of the tips KMetalMind gave are very useful. :)

Really thanks for your own tips and corrections! I usually have trouble right in the beginning. Then I get a upward trend by year 3-5, and minus having trouble with some epidemies or earthquakes depending on the moment, it´s a win from there.

I really didn´t think you could get a upward trend from the beginning :) I thought plants helped maintaining the patients happy, which makes reputation higher. Didn´t know you don´t need to bother with them (lol, that tip would have really helped me). Personally, the loan is better than having low money, as the bank loan is counted as owned money, so you can fail a level if you have a negative amount, yet if you are on negatives with a loan, you don´t fail the level, and you have a cushion for some time to get your balances right. I loved to put a formation room in the beginning of the game, but I couldn´t train them fast enough in some of the later levels, meaning I were losing money for personal I wasn´t using... So I waited until later in the game, when I really need more specialized personal.

So what happened is that I got too many janitors, too much interests in the bank loan, many medics with high salary, many money wasted on both heaters and plants... And all of that made me have money troubles right on the beginning :) Thanks for clearing me all those things, because although I don´t need them to beat the game, I´ll use them to improve on my next playthrough, whenever it will be ;))

Excellent tips here, which deserve to be on the first page so other new players can see it too.

Plants
Don't think I agree with the "no plants" approach though. When I build a new room I usually pick one each of plant, radiator (or more if the room is big), fire extinguisher and bin. Place the plant near the door so the handyman can get to them quickly. Very recently I've started lowering "Go to rest room" to 50%, but even when at 60% very rarely did any staff complain and want pay rises. Maybe that was partly due to plants in every room, and keeping the temperature at medium.

Land
When you buy a new land area but don't use the whole space, put benches across the room so the handymen don't wander all over the place, which also prevents you from having to put up lots of radiators for the moment. I've found that one big reason for staff to want pay raises is being too hot or too cold. So wandering handymen who freeze will ask for pay raise at some point.

Depending on the layout of the starting area(s), you may want to get a new land area right away, and put training, research and a small staff room there. This can be way out of the way of the main hospital, as these don't have to interact with patients (I never send patients to be molested in the research room autopsy machine).

Specialists
Fully support to get all the specialists you need from the beginning. In the last mission I played (fourth last), I didn't get the surgeon from the start as I figured I'd train some junior surgeons instead as they were plentiful on earlier missions. However, this time not a single surgeon of any kind showed up for 5 years, and I checked at the beginning of most months, even hiring the dross sometimes to refresh the list. Get them early, even if it costs a bit a month, so you don't have to worry about it for years on end. One of each is enough as you can train them, but get two surgeons early if you can so they can operate.

Space vs Time
Usually I make rooms only slightly bigger than they have to be. Then I checked out the savefiles from this walkthrough. Just wanted to see how different his designs were from mine, but the thing that jumped out of the screen was that his rooms were often *much* larger than mine. This resulted in a wee test, as I wanted to check if this mattered much.

My usual GP's office room size is 4x5 or 4x6 so I compared that with 7x7. Typically a patient in the small GP used 19 seconds from sitting down to getting up, having received his partial diagnosis. In the large room, however, the same time was 8 seconds (this was while playing on "Slower" speed). That's a massive difference, but the room is also much bigger. With the minimum size of 4x4 you can actually squeeze 3(!) GPs in the same space as the big 7x7 GP. So it may be that this evens itself out. Not sure what is best. You'll save some in wages as you need fewer doctors because they can diagnose more patients in the same time, but you're also likely to need more real estate due to much bigger rooms. There is no doubt that the in-game tip of staff working faster in bigger rooms is correct, though.

Hospital design
This is tip from MagicMagor in this topic on epidemics (where you can also see how green I was on some game mechanics). Try to create proper waiting areas to the side of the main hallways, instead of rows of benches outside the rooms or in the corridor itself. This will cut down on the amount of epidemics, and the severity of them. You'll still get them, but hopefully not as often. Be wise about where you place them, though, because if it's too far away from where the patient needs to go, (s)he'll just stand outside the room instead of sitting down. Also place drinking machine(s) near the waiting area as this is when patients use them the most (if they're already on the way to a room they seem to do that irrespective of thirst).

Get the core rooms in the same area, preferably the starting area. Get up GPs, pharmacy and ideally also a general diagnosis and/or ward and a psychiatric (in addition to waiting area, toilet and probably a staff room). I've found that when epidemics hit they'll often occur here due to the amount of people around the reception and GP area. But if a patient has to go to the pharmacy and it's in another building, the health inspector will automatically be summoned when the patient leaves the building he was in. Not good! Hospital design can make dealing with this problem easier, but the starting area isn't always big enough to accommodate all these rooms. However, in later areas new real estate is often linked via hallways, so patients won't step outside, removing this problem.

Already mentioned by others, but try to get the same type of rooms nearby. GPs and pharmacy(ies) are crucial in the starting area. Then you'd want diagnostics rooms nearby, in its own wing(s). You should place a GP here too, so patients don't have to go back to the starting area for the GPs there. Then place cure rooms in its own wing(s). This will also make it easier to keep a tab on machine repairs, as most are in the same area. You can stick a Fracture Clinic near a ward of pharmacy, however, as it requires a nurse and she'll often then go between the rooms depending on need, instead of crisscrossing through half the hospital.

Do try to get important rooms near the Helipad. This especially includes the phychiatrist and pharmacy, but ideally also the operations theatre and some much-used cure rooms like the slicer and inflator. This makes it easier to complete emergencies, as the patients will have a shorter walk to reach their destination. The clock is ticking, so this may be important. If you can't treat some of them in time, it's probably best to just kick them out before the timer runs out, as otherwise they'll die, possibly costing you the 10,000 reward at the end of the year.

Hopefully this will help some people.

There is one issue that puzzles me though. Just about every year I get a bad diploma for not maintaining my machines. But the hospital is packed full of handyman, many with machine repair instructions, and the machines are never in danger, unless a serious earthquake have just hit. Often I'll even manually ask them to repair machines. So I don't understand why the in-game tips keep saying they're getting worn out and the end of year 'awards' almost without fail keep saying repairs are not up to par. Any ideas?

Hmphrg. There is another issue that puzzles me now. Started the next last mission, Croaking, and wondered how to set up the reception area, particularly the size of the GP offices. So did a little test. Set up a GP of 5x7, 7x7 and 4x4. From a patient sat down to he got up again, it took 11 seconds in the 7x7 and 18 in the 5x7. That made decent sense. Bigger should be better. Then I sent the Doc into the small 4x4. Time? 6 seconds. Without fail, 6 seconds. WTF?

To make it even more weird, I set up another 4x4 on the south wall, but here times were 14 seconds. It was a 100% mirror-design of the northern office, yet times were more than doubled. I don't get it at all.

But whatever is the cause of this, I'm now less sold on the idea of huge offices. Had lots of small ones in the previous mission, Eggsenham, and it was a nightmare as people flowed into the hospital. Increased all prices to 105% and that helped a bit, but it was still rough, and we had 6 GPs in the end. Hoped bigger offices would make it easier to handle the huge flow of patients in the last missions, but I guess not.

Bigger offices just make staff happier I think but not necessarily more efficient haha.
I always stuck with the smallest size for the GP offices and had 2 by the entrance of the hospital and 2 reception desks.

Then I put diagnosis rooms further away and put 1 more GP office there. So that patients going through the diagnosis process can flow to that office, leaving the entrance offices to focus on processing new patients. Later on I sometimes build 1 more GP office near the diagnosis area (but I got away with just 3 GP offices on the very last level of the game with not too much overcrowding). I've also heard this strategy of making "areas" (entrance, diagnosis area and treatment area) helps lessen epidemics, as you mentioned.

Consultants, when you can train them up, of course are best for the GP office, they can diagnose people more efficiently and are faster moving around. With regard to the layout of the room, I put the desk facing one wall and the filing cabinet right behind his chair, since he always has to get up and go to the cabinet everytime a patient comes in it speeds things up (stand up, go behind chair, get file, sit back in chair). I also place the patient chair right next to and facing the door. So the patient basically sits down right after entering the room. It doesnt matter if theyre not facing the GP or anything, they can be talking to a potted plant for all the game cares :)

I also put a Pharmacy right by the entrance GP offices. For those conditons that are quickly diagnosed and treated by a gulp of medicine. And later, another Pharmacy over by the Diagnosis area.

The same rule of smaller being better apparently also applies to Training Rooms. As I read a site of Theme Hospital tips that said having small Training Rooms with a few bookcases, a skeleton, and 1 or 2 seats for doctors means they train faster. On this page at the very bottom "The fast track"
http://www.eudoxus.demon.co.uk/thc/strategy.htm

With regard to machines. I usually do a routine check regularly. If the machine has even been used once or twice I'll get them to fix it just so that theyre all topped up. I still occasionally have machines that go into dangerous levels when I'm busy or after earthquakes of course but I don't get the bad diploma so I guess that works. I also make sure to save when the earthquake warning comes up. And if anything exploded after the real earthquake hits I go back to my save and buy new ones. If a machine is smoking even without an earthquake, then its time to buy a replacement one.

That's a really good catch, on both points. I simply assumed it made them faster too, and that little test I did seemed to confirm that. Then the next flew right in its face, sort of. Don't understand why the times were so wildly different with the exact same designed and sized room and the same doctor though.Odd. Will definitively keep the rooms small, as otherwise it's really hard to get enough of them. Am about to start the final level now, and it looks like a nightmare because the starting area is tiny so there isn't room for all you need, which will make epidemics a 'mare to deal with. No matter what they have they'll leave the building and call the health dude.

Great find for the small training room. However, are you sure it's correct? I've made gigantic training and research rooms so far, but if it doesn't do anything we could save a LOT of space!

I continue to struggle with the waiting areas though. But in the last mission I played, Croaking, we didn't have many serious epidemics so maybe it worked out well there. Seems like a bit of a lottery. Honestly, it seems like it's when you have those massive influxes of patients that is the breaking point, not necessarily the design itself. If the GPs can take off that pressure okay, it won't be too bad. But if you happen to have 15-20 people collected in the same area, it's just a matter of time before a serious epidemic hits, almost no matter how you design the waiting area for them.

Just a small haha... This was not fun... Check the date :(
1st Death That's very frequent, won't that cut down on the amount of times you can use it before they have to be replaced? Often the strength goes down by 1 per repair. Combined with earth quakes this can be a huge problem in the beginning, when research is focused on getting equipment or better drugs rather than improvements. One earthquake can wipe out a machine. Have used your save trick too, and it can be very useful. Same with hitting "1" as soon as you get the pre-quake warning, and then checking all your machines. If you are fast enough and locate the right handyman, he can repair it in time, or if their strength is low you can buy new ones.

Another small tip that should have been mentioned above is about rooms. I'm sure you all do it, but it's not obvious. You don't have to sell rooms if you need to re-design an area. You can just click the X once (removing the furniture) and then move it, even to a whole new building, then put the furniture and so forth back in. In big missions where re-designs are pretty much mandatory, this can save quite a bit of money compared with selling rooms in building A and building a new in building B, because you don't get a full refund from rooms (but looks like you do for benches and radiators).

I haven't made giant Training Rooms so can't compare really. To be honest they never seem to train fast enough for me, its a shame the Consultant doesnt walk fast in the Training Rooms too bah! This is how my entrance area was in the last level (at this point I had pretty much hit all the goals and waiting for it to finish):
Reception Area

Here are some other areas if interested:
Diagnosis Area
Operating / Ward Area
Treatment Area Looking at my save file, by "used 1 or 2 times" I mean the Status bar, each time someone uses the machine, the Status goes down by 1 notch. So when I routinely checked the machines I focused solely on that bar and if it had gone down I fixed it. If it was full I left it. I didn't pay attention to a Strength stat (forgot it existed if it does haha oops) but it seemed to work OK, nothing blew up except after heavy earthquakes (and I always saved before those). If it does affect the Strength badly then maybe fix them a bit less frequent e.g. after 3 uses / 3 notches down of the Status bar. Came in handy in the last level when I decided to cheat and move one of my GP offices in the Reception Area (which wasnt busy) to a random place in the hospital and put the Treatment room for a Slack Tongue emergency in its place right by the Entrance. Then moved the GP office back after, haha.

The game is incredible simplistic if you play it like this:

basic stuff:
1) 1x heater in every room and spread some through the building to cover heat ( at the start let people get it cold rather then spending a fortune on heat, in the middle raise the heat or place more heaters )
2) see stuff on the ground? get a new handy men, its better to have to much of them then to little. ( specially when earthquakes happen and repairs have to be done on a daily basis. )
3) skip plants all together, place maybe 2-3 in a entire map just to have it. but that's it. They are useless
4) only make these rooms big:
- toilet ( place atleast 6 toilets + wash thingy's in there )
- rest room ( have space for every item in the list + 6 sofa's )
- ward build a room that supports atleast 4 bed's.
5) always repair your machines so that they are 95% + repaired.
6) specially gp's offices / general diagnosis and pharmacy limit the wait line ( press on the door ) towards 4 max, so that the population will spread better towards the different ones.
7) training room is useless unless the level specifically says that you need to train your own doctors ( 1 mission i believe does this ), just buy them no matter what price from the job market. ( i only build one if i need to increase my hospital value and don't need other rooms ).
8) Accept all emergency's and vip visits right from the start, never ignore them its free cash.
9) research ( only the first two "cure equipment and diagnosis equipment" are really important the others are not. I do keep it on 20% on all of them tho, its enough but you can increase it in these two if you want.
10) if people whine about "building more diagnosis buildings, just keep them waiting always". they probably need a room that is about to be invented by your research department, and when it does build it = directly money from those people. Never send them home. waste of money.

This is how you build from the start ( don't put the game speed on slow, just keep it going on normal you have time enough ).

Start first month:

1x reception + 1 drinking machine + 1 girl behind the reception
3x Gp's offices next to eachother with a no skill cheap doctor ( all next to eachother, also make sure you push a lot of benches here )
2x generation diagnostic + 2x cheap doctors ( next to eachother )
2x pharmacy + 2x cheap nurses
1x handymen

Start second month it probably opens now and build the following:

1x inflation room + cheapo doctor
2x psychiatric rooms + a doctor with the needed skill ( leave one empty doctor wise if needed, just get one running, but that on mid level you can push a new doctor in the second one, as it will be needed for some emergency's.

If you get to short on cash, lone 20.000 extra. You will make it back in no time.

Let the hospital run a bit, it doesn't matter if you are going into the red for a bit in the early part., you will make tons and tons of money later on ( i mostly end my mission with having the profit indicator maximal to the right ( max green ). I basically end with on average ~400.000 cash. sometimes 500.000 sometimes 300.000.

Next month:
.
1) Build a research dept ( one of the most important building to have ), put a researcher doctor in it.
2 )Watch if there is trash on the ground = get another handy men ( mostly mid level i have around 5-6 of them roaming around, 1-2 at the start ) .
3) Repair your machines so that earthquakes won't ruin your hospital.
4) build the left over rooms that aren't builded yet when the money is there.


next month and the months after


Pretty simple just keep reading messages, if a new room is developed by your research department. build it directly ( but only one of each ). Build every room once at least besides the rooms which i mentioned at the start.

Make sure your people can sit at every door, place heating in every area, and place some additional water machines ( i mostly place them at doors. ) Krank heating up to the max at later game when you are rich as hell, but keep it on the normal level at the start.

Any junk get a new handy men.

After the first year you can basically walk away from your pc and just let the game complete itself. I mostly do this when everything is in place. And just let my hospital reek in the money by itself.

The game is pretty darn simplistic.

This has all been tested & doublechecked!
GP offices are tricky to optimize IF you miss 1 important detail: the way the doctor steps up from the desk depends on what way he/it is facing!
When the doctor faces NE when sitting at the desk, he will step out to the right, so cabinet is best right side of desk
When facing NW when sitting at the desk, he will step out to the left, so cabinet is best left side of desk
When facing SW when sitting at the desk he will step out to the right, so cabinet is best below the desk
When facing SE when sitting at the desk, he will step out random, can be both left and right... so avoid this!
to help I understand what I mean I have attached 1 file (containing 2 screenshots) of the end of lvl 11 of my playthrough. (IF it works... uploading files with a post seems not to work that well :( )
These GP offices are facing the NE wall. It also shows 100% optimized operating clinic, psychiatrist & scanner room. The ward can only be made 100% optimized IF the door can be placed ideally, but this is of small/no concern, because the ward diagnoses & treats multiple patients at the same time.
Important: as Sai.257 points out higher skilled doctors (green bar) give a higher boost to a patients diagnosis! this boost will be the difference between the same patient going: GP > diagnosis > GP > get cure. IF this was done by a crap skilled doctor: GP > diagnosis > GP > diagnosis > GP > get cure. This obviously is horrible for a patient's death-timer!

I will post ALOT more details/game-mechanics that I have discovered/found/read about once I find time to play lvl 12!
some quick things:
-ALL normal patients have a so-called 'Death-Timer' that is invisible (unlike emergency patients death-timer!). This is why your 1st focus should be on curing patients ASAP & limiting any unnecessary delays (so don't bother with benches and toilets!!! they are absolutely horrible and delay so much, their impact is more negative then positive!)
-do NOT underestimate the bottleneck effect that can happen when GP offices have lines forming for them! (this doubles when another diagnostic room is forming lines! and takes away time from EVERY patients' death timer that comes after it; fix it ASAP)
-only the ward (recommended: 9x6), research dep (6x6) & staff room (as needed) have a good practical use to being bigger then their minimum size! (4x4 staff rooms work fine also!!!.)
-do not bother yourself with: benches, toilets, bookcases, skeletons, pool tables & game-consoles > walking to these objects slows down or even stops things that you don't want it to slow down/stop (like patient treatment/learning/resting!) - no joke!
-staff room only should have 1 radiator (or 2 if it is bigger then 6x6 or 36 tiles) & filled couches for optimal resting!
-Plants are NOT useless! but yes they require ALOT of upkeep time so SERIOUSLY limit how many you get to rooms that are in high demand (such as: GP offices, training room, operating clinic & scanner room I would suggest). they increase staff happiness in rooms!
-1 researcher of doctor rank is enough if you: research cure equipment 100%, then diagnosis 100%, then spread as wanted among improvements & drugs. (do not take him out untill cure +diagnosis is completed)
-windows: place the door for optimal path & building, then fill up on windows EVERYWHERE (yes even research dep! it only gives -rep when you USE autopsy machine on patients!) they increase staff happiness
-patient emergencies, VIPs, Epidemics & Earthquakes are triggered on specific dates! (patients will help to stop the spread of epidemics IF they have the space for it, they try to avoid stepping on used tiles/spaces - rats have 0 impact on this, do keep your hospital clean!!! filth can cause plagues!!!)
-teaching is very useful and help keeps salary low if staff is kept happy! (I aim for surgeon + psychiatrist teacher)
-cardiogram room is optional! (and the slowest diagnosis room of all!)
-keep changing ALL your prices to 99% whenever u make a new diagnosis room, cure room or discover a new cure! > patients will now always pay + diagnosis & treatment rep will increase, making their price increase automatically & attract more patients for even more $$! = keep control and rep will never be a concern again!
-high skill lvl on receptionist is utterly useless x'D

@Gatygun
-what difficulty did you play on?
-no specialists?
-why wait with the research dep. till month 3???
-if you get a notification that more diagnosis rooms are needed; your GP office doctor lacked the skill-lvl to recognize it OR you had bad luck (it is % based, the higher the doctor's skill-lvl, the higher chance of discovering the illness!)

good luck, have fun & game on!