Outpatient Surgery.

An outpatient surgery center would not only be a realistic approach to the game, but a quick and easy way to make money for your hospital. An outpatient surgery center is a place for procedures to be performed that are minimally invasive (hernia repairs, colonoscopy’s, tonsillectomies) and the patient would go home that very same day without being admitted to the hospital. It could simply be implemented like any other ward, but instead of housing high dependency, diagnostic, and regular ward bedding it would simply host two wings.

The first wing would be pre-op where the nurse would check the patient in, get them in a bed, and prep them for the surgery. The second would simply be post op, where the patient would be brought and discharged from within the same day.

This would be a great addition to the game, and bring a different playing field when starting a new sandbox.

Outpatient operations could be viable in other departments as well - usually the 'money-sinks' like labs, radiology & pathology. A clinic or aspiring hospital could grow by doing service diagnoses for other PhDs in town. Imagine a general practitioner needing a blood sample analyzed. Many do not have even a stat lab as they 'only' cure things like common cold - the doc you visit, when you have the sneeze, stomach hurt or burning pee. The first one to help you and maybe send you to a specialist and they tend to let other specialists do advanced diagnoses like sending a patient to a radiologist because your doc hasn't got an X-ray in his office - too expensive. Or the local coroner/police finding corpses and needing to know the cause of death. Bigger cities might have their own police forensic unit but smaller towns might send the dead to a hospital's pathology instead. Also, imagine patients only visiting your hospital for getting a vaccination or are there as blood donor. This is even stuff that could be done by a nurse supervised by a doc - which would give raise to making them more useful for clinics - currently they only work as receptionist. In my country, a doc is mostly accompanied by a nurse assisting with anamnesis or doing mundane stuff like bandaging a wound, do paperwork, giving a vaccination and similar things. In ontology, a nurse is required to assist chair work in addition to a doc like holding the suction tube, switching equipment etc.