Project Hospital Be the architect, boss and doctor

Zoom all the way in and you are the doctor. Patients arrive with complaints, and you run the examinations yourself: physicals, lab tests, X-rays, specialist equipment, until the symptoms line up into a diagnosis. Someone comes in with vague pain and breathing trouble, nothing alarming, then collapses in the waiting room. You can also hospitalize patients, follow a favorite through their stay, or walk your doctors through the most complicated cases yourself.

Every hospital starts as an empty plot and your decisions. Lay the foundations, zone the rooms (each has size and equipment requirements), then furnish them from a collection of objects, materials and colors, or save time with prefabs. Go small with a modest clinic or stack up a multi-storey hospital with departments on separate floors. Where you put the surgery center relative to the wards, how many toilets you plan for, how short the walk from reception to a bed is: layout is strategy here, and the flow of patients through your building is the score. Every hospital you build ends up different from the last one.

Step back out to management level and the hospital becomes a business. Sign contracts with different insurance companies to attract patients with interesting conditions, then balance the budget against how quickly people get treated and how satisfied they leave. Hiring is a discipline of its own: doctors, nurses and janitors each have their own stats, specializations and stress levels, and part of the job is making sure everybody is doing good work and finds satisfaction in it. A patient collapsing in a corridor while you apply for a loan is a real possibility. Profit and healthy, happy patients are the score.