![]() You need to make sure each step along the way, and each department they might need to visit, is properly staffed, and that those staffers-doctors, specialists, techs, nurses, and building maintenance crew-all have physical places to work and do their jobs, and that they aren’t tripping over each other along the way. There’s a complex flowchart you can pull up that details the path patients move along from intake to hospitalization, transfer, or discharge. ![]() I’ve had several come in suffering from Raynaud’s Syndrome, which is a condition that causes the blood vessels in the hands and feet to constrict, making the fingers and toes painfully cold.Īs a management sim, Project Hospital also wants to recreate the triage pipeline you’d find in a real hospital. Patients show up with sprains, cuts, or hayfever. Project Hospital is full of little details drawn from the everyday practice of medicine. I selected closed reduction on her chart, and she was wheeled off to have someone pop her ankle back into place. Second, because his clinical recommendation for my patient was right there on Project Hospital’s list of available treatments. I was delighted for two reasons-first, that he was actually connecting with a video game I was showing him. “She’ll need a closed reduction,” Dad said, almost automatically. Fortunately, the X-ray department was fully functional, and when my patient finally made her way up, they found that Dad was absolutely correct: she had a dislocated ankle. You want patients to be able to get from the ER to Radiology quickly, he explained, and a three-story elevator trip was going to be a problem. “That’s no good,” Dad said, shaking his head. Building him a workspace, with a desk and computer and chair to sit in, was still on my to-do list. I had thought to hire a technician to run the machine, and the poor guy was standing near the new CT scanner, looking bewildered. It was sitting on bare subfloor, in an area where I hadn’t even gotten around to putting in wall partitions. I had put in a new CT scanner on one side of the unfinished third floor, which also housed my X-ray unit. He asked where my imaging department was, and I showed him: it was three floors up, and… severely under construction. And that makes the similarities between the two at first fascinating, and then unnerving. But Project Hospital is a game, and the healthcare industry is supposed to keep people alive. This loop keeps the game engaging: It’s a system that you can learn, develop, and master, with difficulty and complexity increasing as the scenarios get larger and new elements are introduced. You’re creating efficiencies in the physical space available to you in order to extract the highest possible profit per hour. That’s how management sims like Project Hospital or Parkitect or Railroad Tycoon work: you want to do as many things as you can and make sure those things are as expensive as possible. healthcare system, particularly in the structural incentives to do more, charge more, bill more. I thought that would be an interesting thing to write about-how despite the best of intentions, simulation games always have to cut corners somewhere and fit things into a framework of fun.īut the more I talked with him, the more I felt a creeping unease both at how the supposedly gamey elements of Project Hospital mirror elements of the real U.S. I wanted Dad to show me where Project Hospital was different from a real hospital. Of course, it’s still a game, and games are supposed to be fun. Drawing up schedules for other physicians to keep the ER running was something he intensely disliked, almost as much as attending mandatory meetings required by hospital management. It’s clear to me he loves this side of the job, while the administrative side of the role has been a much less natural fit. I remember dozens of dinner conversations in which he’d excitedly describe difficult cases of inserting emergency airway tubes into patients that arrived at his ER, unable to breathe on their own. This was Dad's work too, and he loved it. ![]() Project Hospital isn’t: It’s a serious management sim that wants to realistically show players something about how hospitals work. It’s a bit of a rarity-of the games that have taken on healthcare as their topic, almost all of them ( Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital, Surgeon Simulator) have all been goof-fests. Project Hospital is a game very much in the mould of Theme Hospital, but with a decidedly more serious approach to the subject matter.
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