is anyone else having this issue?

does anyone know how to solve it?

I've not had that problem, but if this is on the later levels, you probably need more than one reception to deal with the flow of patients, so that might help. If nobody are approaching though, and the queue isn't mucked up (think it defaults to 6 people), you can try to lower the speed and remove the reception before placing a new one. Maybe that fixes it somehow.

Of course, there has to be a receptionist behind the desk, but I assume that is in order.

As posted above, it's connected with having not enough of reception desks. Place some more, problem will be solved.

I have two reception desks with receptionists at them, and they just aren't doing anything to shift the queue, even if there are one or two people in the queue. I've tried sacking the receptionists and getting new ones as well as selling the desks and buying new ones. Is there anything else I can do?

Hi,

Open the queue and select the first patient. Right click and choose send to reception desk , or send to home. This usually helps. This also works when there is queue in GP's office.

Sometimes if the reception desk is blocked off by something then the queue will remain. If the first person in line is somehow stuck somewhere then it won't shift the rest. I just send the first person in the queue home if it happens to me.

I had similar issue and solved it by building more GP's offices. In my case problem was in GP's office's queue reaching it's maximum so reception sent people to GP's office only when office's queue was decreasing.