I played this game a long time ago and started playing it now thanks to the GOG release but I've never fully understood how Receptionists work.

Do receptionists have to direct patients to EVERY room they go to, or just when they first step into the hospital? Because I've observed plenty of patients jumping between rooms going from diagnosis to treatment without seeing the receptionist in between, but I've read from more than one source that they allegedly direct people to treatment rooms, etc.

Also, I've no clue how a receptionist's skill level actually affects their performance. What's their performance rated as? One thing that confuses me is that sometimes I have this gigantic queue of people waiting to see the receptionist and patients move to see her at a very slow pace. Does her skill level increase that pace? Would putting in a second receptionist+desk help with that queue at all? I've tried putting in two receptionists but they share the same queue so I'm not sure if that's helping.

To my knowledge, receptionists only deal with patients entering your hospital. I only ever have 1 receptionist and 1 desk and there's never any line whatsoever. Just hire the most skillful one you can find and you'll never have to worry about it again.

Yeah you only really need one until maybe the later levels when the reception gets queued but that's a long way off.

They only talk to patients when they enter the hospital.

Poor receptionist though, they never get a break and get to go play pinball in the staffroom!

I dunno how they work, but I did notice one patient going to reception before treatment. So it's not only when entering. (or maybe I hallucinated? :P he was exiting one of the diagnostic rooms and had "going to reception" on him) Maybe it happens when there's more than one room of one kind in the hospital?

I managed to get pretty large queues and putting more reception desks did help, but i actually had them in two separate buildings.

The receptionist seems to be either bugged or works in a very different way. They never get tired or get unhappy. Patients usually visit the reception first and are led to the offices.

You can force patients to revisit the reception. This may be helpful sometimes when some of your queues are too long and don't have time to manage it manually. But keep in mind that receptions that are built too close share the same queue so don't build them too close. But usually you don't need more than one or (in later levels) two.
Protip: when you face epidemics replace the reception far away from the entrance (or build two and when you face an epidemic sell the first one and rebuy it) so if the timer runs out for any reason the guy has to walk through the whole hospital first and you have some extra seconds before he checks the status.

Has anyone tested if the skill level of receptionists has an effect to the time a patient need to stay at the reception or may influence where a patients is sent to (maybe a dumb receptionist tend to "fill" just one office)? If there's no effect you can save some money.

Actually if they're going to be near together, sharing a queue is more efficient than two separate queues - both in the game and in real life. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_model#Multiple-servers_queue)

But if you already have too many patients at the offices a faster rate of new patients may be contraproductive.
And I doubt that the amount of patients usually enter the hospital would make a noticable difference. Anyway it's a nice theory.

Not sure about that, but I only contract one.
Have at least one and contract as a maximum two if the hospital is very big.

Having a second Receptionist desk in the hospital also allows you to essentially start another entry point for patients, who can walk in from multiple directions from outside the map.

This is useful later in the game when your hospital is getting very big if you want to build a second diagnosis wing, where patients will walk from the receptionist to the GP to your array of duplicated diagnosis rooms rather than gumming up your first set of rooms.

I have noticed that the more skilled receptionists walk a lot faster over to the reception area. I assume they are also faster in dealing with patients.

They do not tire like doctors etc.

If people are queuing stupidly (say you have two pharmacys and one has 10 people queuing and the other is vacant) then you can click on half of them and send them to the receptionist and she will hopefully send them to the more logical pharmacy.

Otherwise I think they just see her when they enter the hosptial?

:)

I've been wondering why sometimes there's a huge queue at the hospital reception and I finally figured it out! It happens when all the GP queues are already full.

So to solve this issue, you have to build more GP and people will stop queuing stupidly at the reception, and also they will stop vomiting and getting unhappy before they even started queuing their first GP.

I've definitely seen patients re-visit reception. I would assume they're more likely to do that if your GP doctor isn't all that good.

I realize that this is an old post, but in case anyone is looking through here: You can move patients directly from one queue to another (no need to revisit the receptionist). Just click on the queue that is too full, grab a person and drag them to the room you would rather have them go to.

Oh :| wow, I didn't realise that! :)

Skill level does affect how quickly receptionist processes a patient's check-in. You can verify that by having them walk to their Reception Desk to see if one is "Consultant" level or not. Until the second year there ins't much need for any but the cheapest.