Theme Hospital for every hospital manager

I’m extremely stoked to find that they’ve released an HD mod for an old game that I used to play, called “Theme hospital” by “Bullfrog”. Surprisingly it still works perfectly despite being more than ten years old and it still looks great. I used to play for hours in my teen days, before I had any idea that I was actually going to become a nurse someday, and practically live inside the walls of a hospital for a good few years! An unintentional manifestation I call it. I think I was enjoying the game a little too much!

I used to enjoy managing the staff, hospital budget, equipment and patients in the game. It felt really satisfying when you got through a challenging level and started building a good reputation, so that you could earn more money to improve upon your hospital. Of course the games’ difficulty level could never match up to the real thing but I often found myself thinking that the management at my hospital could do with a good game of Theme Hospital because they don’t seem to have any management skills at all. Perhaps the game could reinforce some basic principles.

It teaches you that staff should be kept happy, with a relaxing staff room, a nice salary and as little overtime as possible. If you failed to budget, and couldn’t hire more staff to assist overworked staff, your hospital literally collapsed. Patient happiness depended on the quality of care and you had to keep your staff happy, to keep your patients happy. If you didn’t do proper queue management (prioritize patients), your patients died in the hallway and you’d suffer the consequence. Control of infectious disease, cleanliness, comfort, maintenance of equipment and staff education mattered hugely in the game and were the deciding factors on whether you passed or failed the level.

These were the types of things that didn’t get enough attention at the hospital that I worked for. They’re so lax on training staff you could be an LPN (staff nurse) for years before they’d allow you to train again (depending on your skin colour of course!). Staff were continuously unhappy and overworked, the patients were always complaining because they weren’t getting the attention they deserved (not enough staff). If this happened in the game, the hospital manager would have her name plastered to the hall of shame and she’d be fired. But in South Africa, criminals become presidents, so why not hire total idiots to run our hospitals?

On the lighter side, I do wish we had patients with funny illnesses like ‘Bloaty Head Syndrome’, ‘Slack Tongue disease’ and ‘Elvis Syndrome’ – at least staff would have a fun day at work.  I love this game. Try it out sometime. 🙂