However, they don’t always work, although you certainly learn from every failure. When dealing with a complex system, there are ways of determining what’s going on, and making changes that lead to benefits. Just a sort of grudging general observation that you don’t seem to be doing any work. More importantly, when you get things right, and things go well, you won’t get any of the praise. You’ll still be blamed when things fail, however. There is this illusion that you can manage everything, but sometimes, things simply don’t work. This was work last Tuesday.”Īnd that’s the most accurate issue about administration that the game is able to portray. It was then that I had a moment, when I sat back, stared at the screen full of angry people, and realised: “Crap. I simply couldn’t work out how to lift people’s spirits. People were grumpy, patients were queuing in droves, I was throwing more and more money at everything I could think of, but nothing I was doing seemed to work. There was a brilliant moment midway through one of the levels when I was struggling to work out how to improve the satisfaction of my staff. I refrain to comment on the benefits to my emotional health as a result of being able to indulge in this fantasy. In addition, this game appears to operate in a world without industrial relations laws, where I can fire any clinician I wish at any time. There is also a great secondary goal in progressively training staff to become capable in multiple fields, together with the expected jump in ego and entitlement which leads them to ultimately demand huge pay rises or leave. I’m sure it shouldn’t really take that long. I’m amused that I can train a general practitioner to perform psychiatric interventions in approximately a week. It’s great that there are actual efforts at the sort of “touchy-feely” training courses like positive attitude training that real life staff absolutely despise but we know actually work. There is a real issue between ensuring staff are in the right roles, busy in the business of curing patients, but also the long-term effects of having them attending training. I don’t tend to hire too many ghostbusters in real life, though. Finding that the process I’d use in real life worked perfectly in the game was a great testament to its design. In this virtual case, I was surprised to find that the patient’s loss was due to a nurse I’d hired who had excellent skills in ward management but poor skills in treatment, coupled with a poor quality drug dispenser. One of the most critical issues in hospital administration is root cause analysis - that, following a critical incident (or near miss), we have to dispassionately work out why an issue occurred, and walk a fine line between allocating blame or identifying the systems failures that led to the critical incident. Now that’s true, of course, but I’m very impressed at how these kinds of high-stakes issues are humorously dealt with (it is a game, after all), but somehow not ignored either. Which brings me to the issue of medicine. I shouldn’t harp on about how surprised I am that game design has improved after 20 years, but there is a great feeling about taking the best bits of something I enjoyed a long time ago, and turning it into a wonderful experience. In addition, there are actual repercussions for challenges and decisions the whole way through, which always feel fun. I was struck at the sizing of the main hospital, the entry pattern for patients, the issue of adding windows to make people sitting in clinics feel important (which really works in real life, by the way). This story has been retimed with Two-Point Hospital’s release on consoles this week. And from the outset, the game is remarkably similar to Bullfrog’s original. There’s no doubt that a sizeable number of people playing this hospital simulator are doing so due to the nostalgia factor, although not too many people may be playing this for the same reasons I am. Now, I find myself playing Two Point Hospital as a medical administrator. Over a decade ago, I played Theme Hospital religiously as a medical student.
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