This sequel to Theme Hospital is basically the same game with everything improved and increased. More levels, much better graphics and animation, more radio banter etc. If you enjoyed Theme Hospital, you will probably enjoy this but as the game gets harder, I got to a particularly tricky problem: I couldn't cure enough patients to reach a 90% goal (although I did eventually) and I was running out of ideas so here is how you understand and solve the problem:

The goal applies to the most recent 20 patients so it should quickly get better if you improve things. It can also go down quickly! Like all dynamic goals, you need your other goals to be green for your 90% to count, it won't lock-in if you reach it before reaching the other goals.

Cure rate relates to a number of things that all need consideration:

  1. Some sicknesses do not have high cure rates in a hospital. Look at the illnesses screen to check this out and if some of them have low cure rates, avoid taking emergencies for that illness until you have made other things better.
  2. Doctors and nurses have different abilities and these affect the likelihood of a cure. Using training and the roles checklist under each member of staff try and e.g. get doctors with high GP training to stay in the GP surgery. Keep juniors out of GP surgeries unless you are specifically training them for it. Keep wards staffed with nurses who have ward management training.
  3. Keep training your staff to provide specialism and also general balance. For example, adding pharmacy and injection skills to nurses can be OK (but don't bother giving these skills to ward-trained nurses who should instead have diagnostics and/or treatment skills). Again, use the roles checklist to keep relevant skilled people in their strongest positions but be careful not to under-resource areas, for example, when staff go on a break.
  4. Certain levels attract the same kinds of emergencies so make sure you have enough rooms to deal with these. If you have more than 7 patients, you are likely to need 3 rooms since sometimes machines start needing maintenance part-way through the emergency and the time allocated seems to pass very quickly. You can always close the third room outside of an emergency to avoid tying up a member of staff when 2 rooms can handle it.
  5. Upgrade machines as much as possible to increase the speed and chance of a cure.
  6. Reduce journey times through the hospital as much as possible. Sometimes people leave even though they have already visited the GP 3 times and 2 diagnosis rooms because it is all just adding up too quickly. This relates to good diagnosis (training your staff), long walks between rooms, long queues at GP offices and receptions particularly and not having nearby toilets so that the queue is held up by someone talking a visit to the toilets.
  7. Make sure you have enough GP offices since these are visited more than any other room. If your queues start to get to more than 6 people, build another one. Spread them around the hospital to avoid crowding, add other reception desks and you might well end up with 10 or more GP offices but, again, you can temporarily close them if the queues go down again.