Important Events And Situations
As you progress through the game, a number of urgent events and situations will come up that can make or break you. Managing them well can grant you extra money and increase your reputation. If you fail to deal with them properly, your reputation may be dented, your hospital could be damaged, or you could incur fines.
VIP Visits
Once in a while, a VIP might want to visit your hospital. You should always agree to these to get the cash bonus and reputation boost, unless things are going majorly wrong in your hospital.
Here are some tips to help the visit go smoothly for the VIP:
Before the VIP guest arrives:
- Use your handymen to clean any existing trash or soiled areas, and place any handymen that specialize in cleaning in crowded, heavily-trafficked areas of the hospital.
- Repair all machines with handymen and be prepared to respond quickly in the event of an earthquake.
- If you have plants, have handymen water as many as possible.
- Send all of your tired staff to the Staff Room and/or make sure the staff are set to go to the staff room when below 30% happiness via the policy screen.
- Make sure you have happy and skilled consultants in your GP Offices to get through queues quickly and avoid uncertain diagnoses.
While the VIP is around:
- Don’t gamble or guess at cures. Send patients home instead. Turn down emergencies if you aren’t sure that you can handle them well.
- Make sure you have plenty of drink machines strategically placed throughout the hospital, so no patients are thirsty or uncomfortable.
- Keep the VIP warm. Make sure the heat is at a comfortable level and that there are enough radiators in the corridors.
- Check that you have enough toilets to keep visitors and patients satisfied.
- Keep both the patients and staff as happy as possible.
- Have plenty of benches, so no one has to stand and wait.
- Cure as many patients as possible.
- Keep deaths to a minimum, preferrably none at all.
- Avoid sending patients home, unless they are in critical condition and may die on premises.
- Do NOT let any patients die or be sent to the Research Department (autopsy).
Possible outcomes:
Unsatisfied VIP
- Terrible: Your reputation drastically decreases.
- Bad: Your reputation decreases.
Satisfied VIP
- Mediocre: You get $800-$1500.
- Good: You get $1200-$2000. Your reputation increases.
- Awesome: You get $2000-$4000. Your reputation greatly increases.
Emergencies
At various points throughout the game, a blue emergency light might pop up at the bottom of your screen. When this occurs, you can select it and a message will come up saying an accident happened at a certain place and a specific number of people have a particular health condition as a result.
If you have the resources to handle it and you believe that you can handle it easily, accept it for the extra cash. However, if you fail to cure them all in the time allotted, the remaining emergency patients die and count towards your death count. This can seriously dent your reputation.
*Pro Tip: You can always build an extra treatment room quickly to accommodate a large number of emergency patients. Typically, the reward will be more than the building costs.
Earthquakes
Earthquakes will begin to be an issue after the first few levels. They are annoying at best, and devastating at worst, but at least they give you a bit of warning with a weaker tremble occurring before the actual earthquake.
During an earthquake, your machines sustain damage by an increase in the number of times they have been used. If the usage number exceeds the strength of a particular machine, it will blow up and render the room useless. As if that isn’t bad enough, any doctors or patients using the room at the time of the explosion will die!
Before an earthquake, you should quickly check all your equipment and replace the ones that have been heavily used. Just click on it and use the replace hardware button to replace it. This does cost you money, but it’s worth it to prevent an explosion.
After the earthquake, many machines will need repairing, so be sure to put in the requests and have a decent number of handymen available to respond. If a damaged machine gets used before it can be repaired, it may blow up. It doesn’t hurt to have a few extra hangmen around, especially in later levels. They don’t cost much in wages but can pay for themselves during an earthquake.
Epidemics
In later levels of the game, you have the pleasure of also managing epidemics. You almost always want to try to cover up or deny the epidemic. An infected patient will them have a green blob floating over their head. Move them to the front of the queues and try not to let them go outside for any reason.
Once an infected patient leaves the hospital or goes outside to get to a different area, the ministry will be immediately informed of the epidemic and be on their way to inspect the hospital. If this happens or if you have too many epidemic patients to handle, quickly send them all home.
As long as the inspector does not detect any traces of the epidemic (AKA infected patients) inside your hospital, they will decide in your favor and compensate you monetarily for the false claims against your reputation.
If they do find evidence of an epidemic, you will be fined and your reputation will go down. If there are a bunch of infected patients around during the inspection, your hospital may even be evacuated! This leads to a major dent to your cash flow and your reputation.