doctors and nurses are on idle

When there are patients out in the waiting room or in hospital beds and need to be taken care of, the nurses/and or doctors are just sitting there idle on their computers doing nothing, is this a bug? Also at the receptionist area patients will come in and they will sit down and accumulate till all chairs are full then they go check in, is this a bug as well?

It depends. In most cases the treatment is already queued in the background but there are a few exceptions;

1. The idle doctors are not able to handle the required action (f.i. you need a USG technologist in the cardiology, a doctor will not do it)
2. The patient may have an 'impossible' treatment or diagnosis in the queue, blocking others. That might also block the doctor from jumping to the next patient. (can happen when switching departments with queued actions)
3. Some actions require multiple requirements like free staff and free room or free staff and free equipment. Especially for surgery all required staff must available for it to start.
4. The doctors are told not to do it. You can check the types of work your doctor does. If a patient needs critical transfer and all your nurses have transfer switched off, he won't be transported.

In case of reception, the queue may require a patient that only just appeared on the map but is still considered first by the game engine, making others wait.


I'm not a game dev so I might be wrong on some points.

How Patients are supposed to behave is like this.

1. They enter your hospital and move to the ER reception area. They will attempt to talk to a nurse working there. If non is available they will wait until one becomes available. The reception nurse then does "Triage" where she assigns patients into a priority system depending on their symptoms (this will allow patients with bleeding injuries to skip the waiting line, etc).
2. The patients will then go to the ER waiting room next to your examination rooms (where your clinic doctors work). They will wait there until called by a doctor. Doctors will call patients when they are idle and there is a patient in the waiting room near their examination room. They will overwrite assigned doctors at this point. Any doctor can call any patient in their waiting room if multiple exam.rooms share the same waiting area.

Only clinical doctors will deal with clinical patients. Doctors assigned to On-Call rooms and nurses assigned at the Nurse Station will only work with hospitalized patients assigned to their departments.
For the Emergency Department, this means that doctors assigned to On-Call rooms and nurses assigned to the Nurse Station will deal only with patients that are brought to the Trauma Center, or patients that are sent to Observation. Basically Observation works like a normal ward and the Trauma Center like a HDU ward in other departments.

So what it sounds like to me what the issue is, you only hired staff for the hospital and not for the clinic.

cTrix wrote:How Patients are supposed to behave is like this.

1. They enter your hospital and move to the ER reception area. They will attempt to talk to a nurse working there. If non is available they will wait until one becomes available.

Actually, that's not how it works. The reception is only for more serious cases, for patients with serious injuries that managed to walk themselves to the hospital. The reception puts them ahead of the queue for a doctor visit. All patients that come with less serious illness ignore the reception and queue up for the office themselves at the end of the queue.

Are you sure? I havn't payed  that close attention to know how exactly patients skip the reception. I know that referred cases (marked on their picture in their sheet), come with pre-revealed symptoms and will skip straight to a specialized department. I also don't know how the automatic queue system works where patients draw a number. But the devs have stated that clinic patients will attempt to use an ER reception if it's available, specifically because they will then not use department specific receptions afterwards since they have already been triaged.

It's certainly possible that patients with no revealed symptoms might not use the reception since the nurse can't triage without at least on revealed symptom. But then that wouldn't explain why patients in OPs case were waiting in the reception area.

That's what I noticed from playing so far. Maybe I'm missing something but the reception is certainly targeted towards specific patients, not everyone goes trough it.