Theme Hospital

General Advice

• Alt-S quicksaves, while the 1-5 keys control game speed. Dropping speed to Slowest for a bit is handy in many situation like when building rooms, recruiting people at the start of a month, and dealing with crises.

• With a machine or person selected, right-clicking the name of the machine or the small image of the person lets you scroll through all machines or all people of that type, respectively.

• Avoid casualties; Don't guess at cures at anything below ~95% odds and don't accept emergencies you're not confident in handling. Move patients in bad shape in front of the queue, or send them away if you think they won't make it in time.

• Drink machines combined with enough radiators in your busiest waiting areas brings in good extra revenue. Just don't forget to build toilets, and leave a bit of extra space + some plants to reduce vomiting in crowded areas.

• Machine durability equals Strength minus Times Used, visible in the bottom right. Scroll through your machines occasionally to check their status so that an earthquake won't destroy ones in bad shape. Handyman repair restores Times Used to 0 but reduces Strength by 1, while hardware replacement restores both and applies any Strength upgrades you've researched since.

• Focus your research on cure and diagnosis rooms first. F4 is the research screen hotkey.

• If you buy the game from GOG the default sound-card settings will give you very crappy MIDI music. Here is a link to a thread on the GOG community forums to improve the music: https://www.gog.com/forum/theme_hospital/fixing_the_dreadful_default_midi_rendition

Patient & Room Management

• The normal patient path is GP's Office -> Diagnosis -> GP's Office -> Treatment. Consultant-level doctors can diagnose simple diseases immediately, skipping the middle steps. If your diagnosis rooms are far from your initial Office, consider building a new one closer by so that patients don't have to walk back and forth.

• Good hospital layout is important. High-activity rooms (GP's Office, Pharmacy, Psychiatrist) should always be present near the entrance, and Diagnosis rooms shouldn't be too far away either. Ward and Operating Theatre should be close to each other. Clinics are always the final stop for patients, so they can be a bit further away if need be. Staff Rooms should be close to most workplaces.

• Bigger hospitals will need multiple GP's Offices once queues start building up, so leave space accordingly. Rooms can also be moved or removed at will.

• Pay attention to how the staff and patients move around a room and move objects around if they take a lot of unnecessary steps. A bit of room optimization helps a lot in the busier stages.

Staff Management

• Consultants are far faster and better at everything than lower-rank doctors, so always aim to train more of them. Juniors should only ever be recruited for training, and mid-level Doctors only if you need specialists, are hurting for staff or can't afford Consultant wages.

• Training Rooms are important, especially in the latter stages. Optimally you'll want a Consultant with at least Surgeon/Psychiatrist as a teacher to make more multi-specialized Consultants. Fewer students and more bookcases speed up training, and Juniors learn faster than Doctors while also retaining their low wages.

• A Research Department is also critical, staffed by at least one or two Researchers preferably from the start (with 1 Desk or Computer for each). Doctors in Training and Research never go do other tasks, so building a "staff area" consisting of a Training Room, a Research Department and a Staff Room easily accessible from both lets them function mostly autonomously with little downtime.

• Reducing the default "Tiredness% before resting" value in the Policy Screen from the default 60% to 30-40% will eliminate most issues caused by tiredness.

• Check your staff morale regularly. If someone's unhappy, give them a 10% cash bonus (not a wage increase) - if that doesn't help, their workplace might be missing a heater or sufficient windows, or they might be overworked.

• Only recruit top-tier Receptionists, Nurses and Handymen unless you have no choice as they can't be trained - check back monthly for new picks. Specializing your Handymen for different tasks helps avoid them all moving in clumps to water the same plants, etc.