Chronic conditions

Hi, I’m really interested to find out whether it is in the initial plan for the game to be dealing with patients managing chronic conditions. By contrast, Theme Hospital’s patients all presented acutely with conditions that would be resolved within one visit. What about a patient who has non-life-threatening conditions but which need continual maintenance and checkups. The kind of departments that deal with this often would be gastroenterology or rheumatology dealing with Autoimmune issues - first diagnosis, often treatment of an acute presentation, then maintenance of an ongoing remission. What about patients receiving palliative treatments? As a sufferer of Ulcerative Colitis, the former is my main experience of hospitals!

It is a really good point.
A good idea might be to create day hospital or ambulatory treatment. Routine activity could be really stressful if you have 30 patients and only one doctor available for ambulatory visits. It can add challenge to hospital management

Very good point. Having doctors juggling outpatient clinics for various specialities plus dealing with ward patients and admitting new patients would give an interesting dynamic. The more doctors the easier but that would harm profits (assuming you are a private hospital).

I really liked this one, and i think this kind of approach would add a lot to reallism.
I'm also thinking about the time needed to complete inpatient treatments. I would like to see inpatients having to stay several days at hospital for not-chronic diseases as well, e.g. complicated pneumonia.

I like the idea of chronic conditions representing the potential option for an outpatients check up clinic - at the players discretion. For example you could have the option to diagnose and just send the patients on their way as normal or having them as a regular patient in a separate clinic (custom departments possibility??) for whatever the treatment recommended for that condition. Even better would be if you could only see X number of patients there at any one time and may need to either have a waiting list or turn away patients based on your facilities and capability to treat said patients.

Having expressed my excitement over the idea for treatment of chronic conditions I was also saddened to see in some gameplay that the recommended treatment for a condition I have (M.E, otherwise known as chronic fatigue, as in the game) was antidepressants and exercise when that is rapidly becoming an outmoded and controversial ‘method’ of treatment.