Two Point County initially appears to be a green and pleasant land – but beyond the borders of the starting areas, things start to change. We deliberately increase the difficulty of the game by throwing more patients at you. Understanding how and why these patients come in, and what affects their impact on your hospital, is a key part of understanding the game.
Tip #1 – Don’t forget the essentials!
In the heat of the moment, it can be easy to forget the essentials. Remember to regularly check that your patients have a source of food, a drinking source, things to keep them entertained, places to sit, access to bins, access to toilets and then, depending on what kind of level you are on available air conditioning or radiators (if required).
Placing toilets will avoid this kind of depravity occurring in your hospital. Filth like this will lower the hygiene in your hospital, will put off patients and generally cause more work for your janitors. Do you really want them to spend time picking up human poo?
Tip #2 – Reputation is king
Your hospital reputation governs a lot of factors, not least the likelihood that you’ll attract new patients. So if you’re struggling to bring patients in, have a think about what you can do to increase the reputation of your hospital.
Improving the cure rate is a good starting point, and there are a few tips to help you do that.
Building more rooms is useful for the reputation, at the cost of cash, and can also help you alleviate bottlenecks that may be contributing to negative patient satisfaction. Check your queues. Do you have huge queues for reception and your GP’s offices? It may be worth building more, as these are low-cost solutions.
Building better rooms, such as General Diagnosis, Cardiology and the fancy Fluid Analysis, X-Ray and M.E.G.A. Scanner rooms can make your doctors more sure of a diagnosis, which will lead to a higher probability of a cure.
Hiring better staff is a useful tip, too. On a recent playthrough, we experienced one member of staff inadvertently killing four patients. That’s because they were a truly terrible doctor. Track your staff’s performance on an individual level by looking at their logs, and don’t be afraid to cut the deadwood.
Ernie Nutt here managed to kill four individuals before his reign of terror was brought to an end by a summary dismissal. Keep an eye on under-performing staff and don’t be afraid to swing the axe.
Tip #3 – Use marketing
Marketing can be the difference between your hospital surviving and thriving. If you’re suffering from low reputation, or want to attract patients in to treat specific conditions, then you can do that by building a marketing room and hiring an assistant with marketing qualifications.
Say, for example, you’re playing Melt Downs and you’ve got an objective to bring in and cure 5 patients with Denim Genes and 10 patients with Shock Horror. If you’re waiting around for patients to come in, try three things.
- Boost your hospital reputation. Make sure you have plenty of GP’s offices, pharmacies and low-level cure rooms to deal with a steady flow of patients. Make sure you’re building rooms you need to cure illnesses that people are arriving with.
- Prepare for – and deal with – emergencies. You could get a Denim Genes emergency at a point in the level. Best to be prepared by getting a room built (if you can afford it) to maximise your chances of curing patients quickly. Ensure you have a doctor trained in the DNA lab qualification (it’s super-important in general to ensure your doctors are all qualified to use the equipment you’re assigning them to!)
- Run a marketing campaign specifically targeting potential Denim Genes patients.
Lava lamps, abstract rugs and swanky desks. It could only be marketing.
Tip #4 – Optimise patient flow
So, you’ve got a nice hospital. As Shania Twain once said, that don’t impress me much. And if Shania was an inpatient at your hospital, would she easily be able to navigate between diagnosis, cure and the salty snacks machines?
That’s the question you have to ask yourself.
Think about your hospital layout carefully. Think about how far patients need to walk between common rooms, and what facilities they’ll need along the way.
- Have you looked at the standard routes patients take when they’re being diagnosed and then sent for additional diagnosis or curing?
- Are the additional diagnosis facilities close enough to your GP’s office, or are your patients having to spend a lot of time walking around?
- Do your patients have a long walk between diagnosis and cure?
- Do your patients have enough access to the essentials while waiting or on their journey? (Seating, boredom-relieving items, drinks, food?)
Nail these tips and you’ll have a better chance of preventing your patients from rage-quitting your hospital, but you will of course have to balance the optimal layout with the space available to you.
Seats are treats – at least that’s what we always say.
Tip #5 – Effectively utilise training and R&D
Training is crucial to getting ahead of the game. Trained staff are happier staff, but they’re also more useful staff. Often you’ll get requests from staff to be trained – try to fulfil these requests if you can. It’ll make the staff member less likely to walk out, and make them better at their jobs.
There are a wide array of skills that you can train your staff in – including psychiatry, surgery, ghost capture and more. These skills are also all tiered – you can upgrade psychiatry to level 2, for example.
Some of these skills are general improvements to your staff’s abilities (such as motivation increasing movement speed, or diagnosis offering a better chance at diagnosis), and others are pre-requisites for using certain types of equipment.
You can’t staff a surgery, for example, without having a doctor qualified in surgery. You can’t capture ghosts (and prevent the hospital from being spooked!) without having a member of staff trained in ghost capture. So it’s important to upskill your staff.
This is particularly the case in Mitton University, for example, where you won’t have any staff with qualifications… but you will get a nice bonus on that level for each member of staff you train.
Research and Development is also very important. By building a research room, you can improve your equipment and unlock whole new rooms. Unlocks persist across your organisation… so think about where you build your research labs and how you can get the most out of them. (Tip: Research monitors, servers and desks all contribute to research speed).
Here’s an entire research WING. We’re not messing around here.