MagicMagor: At what difficulty level are you playing?
I'm playing on hard and around halfway through, so maybe i can give you some hints.
The first year is in most cases slow. You will only get a handfull of patients in the first months and your reputation will slowly pick up. So be patient, if your hospital is later booming you will get a lot of money.
In the beginning its also normal that most of your profit comes from the end-of-year bonuses and emergencies.
I think the most important decisions are your staff. Take a look at the skill-bar and try to get only high-skilled staff. One nurse, two handymen and two doctors (one a psychatrist) should be enough for the start of the smaller levels. (Apart from the receptionist of course)
Diagnosis of more difficult diseases, like invisibility may indeed be a problem. In later levels you can resarch a wide range of diagnosis-rooms which makes this easier. (And you start with enough money to build the resarch room at the start)
Another option might be to recruit consultant doctors. Consultants are extremly powerfull, especially in the GP offices where they often diagnosis the diseases right away. This really reduce the need for diagnosis rooms. But this is of course not always possible.
Also you may want to have a look at this site:
http://www.eudoxus.demon.co.uk/thc/index.htm A lot of great tipps, which helped me step up from normal to high difficulty.
I'm playing on Medium. Have only come to the third mission, which I just finished. It was pretty slow money-wise for the whole mission, but started to pick up a little by the end of th third year, not least thanks to 7000 from an emergency, so that enabled me to sneak across the line. Had 6 doctors and fired a few towards the end, which meant more messages about "Doctor to room X", but maybe that helped a bit too, although patients of course had to wait longer.
Have always hired the best doctors and such that we can get, but this time I tried with a consultant in GP, and that really helped. Last time we had long queues because they were coming back 2 or 3 times, but now he often got it right on the first.
Difficult to plan out the wings though, with new rooms and equipment becoming available as you go, and little space to work with. But this time I got up the research room right away so I wouldn't come in the bind of not having money for it again, and then not finding a researcher.
Good link btw, I read the whole thing, and there was some good advice there. Tried to keep mostly diagnosis in the starting area on level 3, but with new rooms becoming available there simply wasn't enough room. But it helped to put small staff rooms in most wings as they didn't have to walk too far.
It actually felt less hectic in this mission than the last, but maybe that's because of the consultant in the GP office.
It's a fun little game; the age old graphics isn't too grating either, but I miss the option to zoom out to more quickly get from one place to the other, and I can imagine this gets worse with levels when keeping up with maintenance on machines is more worrying.
