Better Hospital Staff

Tweaks to the behaviour of hospital co-workers, such as automatic admission of new patients to beds.


Default behavior

The default behaviour of co-workers for the active doctor career in The Sims 4 Get to Work is somewhat lacking.

The nurses tend to pick one patient and then just chat with them for the entire work shift, blocking access to that patient. The doctors tend to just stay on one of the chemical analyser machines all day. The orderly is useful, being the staff member assigned to clean, make beds and repair broken objects.

While playing the active doctor career, I often felt like the staff could do more to help, or at least seem like there were being busy around the hospital. Especially with frustrated patients waiting at reception to be admitted.


Improvement

This mod tweaks the following background behaviour:

  • Orderlies and nurses will deliver food to hungry patients and chat about healthcare.
  • Nurses and doctors will perform random examinations on patients.
  • Orderly will greet new patients waiting at reception and admit them to empty hospital beds. Nurses will attempt to greet new patients only when there’s no orderly.
  • Orderly will badge-in at the reception desk at the beginning of their shift.
  • Orderly will perform calibration tests on the X-ray machines if they are not already calibrated.

So these are just a couple of minor changes and additional behaviours, but I’ve found that it makes my gameplay experience as a doctor more fun. I can focus on treating patients while the staff do things in the background and not just stand around idle all day.


Notes

  • The examinations performed by the nurses and doctors are just for show, and they don’t actually contribute to the diagnosis of the patients. It’s still up to your active doctor to make diagnosis and treatment and allows you to fulfil work tasks.
  • With more options, the nurse should bounce between different patients to perform exams or deliver food, but occasionally they may randomly pick the same patient to chat with repeatedly.
  • At early career levels, your active doctor will be performing the tasks of an orderly – so you will be expected to admit patients to beds yourself (it may even be one of your work tasks). When you reach nurse and doctor level tasks, the game provides an NPC orderly and this mod allows them to perform autonomous patient admissions.
  • At higher level doctor, you may randomly get an “understaffed” day at the hospital situation, where there’s no orderly for the day – just another doctor and a nurse. The nurse will attempt to admit patients when there is no orderly present at the hospital.
  • This mod rewrites the tuning files for a lot of hospital bed related interactions and NPC orderly role. If you have other mods which specifically change the same resources, they may conflict with each other.

Download and install

Download the mod package file and place it in your Mods folder for The Sims 4, found in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 > Mods.

You can check the compatibility with the latest game update on the mod status overview page.

Like this mod? You can support me at buymeacoffee.com/galactrix

47 thoughts on “Better Hospital Staff”

    1. It should be working fine. They don’t usually change much from older packs like Get To Work unless it’s to fix bugs they introduced with newer packs.

  1. There’s a problem of this mod. For example, the X-ray examined patient might be back without bed if there’re too many patients.

    1. Try to clear patients faster to free up beds. I don’t really have any issues, because I added four more exam beds to the hospital and the game never generates more than ten patients.

    1. As far as I know it was working fine with that. All the mods currently available here are what I’m using in the game myself right now.

    1. The mod only touches files related to Get to Work expansion pack, so as far as I know it works fine whether you have Discover University or not.

  2. Everything works except the automatic admission of patients. It says orderlys will admit patients but I only have the nurse, doctor and assistant and none of them do it. Am I doing something wrong?

    1. It’s explained in the notes section on the mod’s info – in the early levels of the doctor career your own sim is the orderly. There won’t be an NPC orderly until you are promoted and reach nurse level stuff. This doesn’t have anything to do with the mod though – it doesn’t affect the default number of staff that appear – that’s still all controlled by the vanilla game.

  3. I just really wanted to say thank you. I basically had to ignore most of the pilling up patience to complete my daily tasks, and not a single other person address one. The first I admitted to a hospital bed, another staff member just walked up and chatted to him and I could not treat him. So very thankful you created a mod to fix this. Otherwise I was considering never actively going to work with that sim.

    1. I haven’t tested it with other people’s mods, but I don’t think there would be any conflict, because they don’t use any of the same resources from the game.

    2. Hey there, thanks for your work! Is it still compatible with the latest patch(march 2021)

      1. It should, as far as I know. Nobody had mentioned any issues to me, at least. They rarely touch the code of older packs in the patches, so they don’t really affect my mods unless the patch notes indicate they fixed something specific. 😉

  4. I was trying this mod for a few days now and is good but the moment an assess collapsed Sim arrives to the hospital you can’t click it or interact at all, the patient will automatically set itself on a bed and wait until the time runs out and leaves saying no one cared to attend him.

    also used to have the more staff for hospital and update to the version shared on this site too but now they are dressed as corresponded but not doing any bed admissions at all at any given doctor level.

    i was really looking forward to have a better hospital experience and they worked for some cases but it does need some serious update because it becomes unplayable.

  5. I don’t think this mod is working with the most recent update 🙁 . ‘Game failed to load’ message when travelling to hospital lot.

    1. Hi. Nothing really changed in the new patch that required updating the mod, but I’ve uploaded the latest version anyway. I tested taking my own sim doctor to the hospital with the mod installed, and it worked normally, so I’d suggest checking any other mods you have and checking the bug forum at EA Answers HQ, as there are many other loading bugs being reported that are due to the patch, including one that seems to happen if you don’t own certain packs.

  6. I just LOVE your mods!
    Doctor career is my favorite, and chatting and blocking nurse always got on my nerves! 😀
    Could you please make mod which would make “Analyze Patient Sample” MUCH quicker? It takes too long time for a working day (even if doc stay late).
    Also is it possible to make a mod what keeps symptoms visible like spots, caughing, head ache etc? Because marks on pateint’s body come and go and they show their symptoms very rarely and random, so I can’t decide their illness when they are just sitting there for several minutes without showing their problems. Or maybe could patients show their symptoms when doctor “Discuss General Health” under “Examine Patient”?
    😊❤

  7. I realized that when patients get food they show their signs of sickness, also that nurses chatting with patients about health also block the active doctor sim. I also found out that nurses can perform X-ray examination on patients which actively help to diagnose illness!
    Could you please make a little change on this mod and let nurses use x-ray autonomous and stop delivering food and chatting?

      • I meant when patients get food and stay lay in the bed, they * DON’T show their signs of sickness”
    1. Currently the mod does what I want it to. I mainly wanted it to make my Doctor’s day at the clinic more productive, not having to worry about admitting patients and having the staff look like they’re doing things in the background instead of standing around unnaturally.

      There’s many more patients than staff, so there’s no way they can block them all from your Doctor. Just treat someone who is free and available. Or if you really need to access a particular patient, just tell the NPC to get out of the way? You just start chatting with them and then click on the floor and choose “Chat Here” to move them.

      I deliberately made sure the mod doesn’t actually help with diagnosis steps (like having the examinations the NPC nurses and doctors do be the dummy versions the game already has built-in, instead of the real versions which progress the diagnosis counter. One reason is, I make mods to make the experience better, but not to cheat. Another reason is, I don’t want the game to be so good at doing things for you that it actually blocks your progress. E.g. if all the staff admitted patients automatically and then you got the work task to “admit patient to exam bed” then you’re screwed and you can’t complete your work day because there’s no patients left. That’s why only the orderly does it.

      I don’t even think there’s an autonomous refer for x-ray interaction in the game, and even if it did, it might not work like you think it would. For example, who would get the notification about the test results? Usually it’s the sim that runs the test – so the NPC nurse would get the notification about if the patient is sick or not and your own sim would get no information?

      That’s why the mod does what it currently does. Nothing fancy, just small changes to existing stuff – all that is already in the game – the nurses and orderlies already have the autonomy pings to deliver food and stuff built-in, but for some reason the game was just bugged and not working. I just made them do what they were designed to do.

      1. “I don’t even think there’s an autonomous refer for x-ray interaction in the game, and even if it did, it might not work like you think it would. For example, who would get the notification about the test results?”
        I tried this with MCCC Control and it doesn’t give notification, but it narrows the possible illnesses. It would help because there isn’t enough time to cure all the patients in a work day without mistreating them. (Sometimes it’s necessary to make x-ray treatment or analyze samples to narrow down to the real illness if the symptoms don’t unequivocal, and those treatments take way too much time. I don’t know/think if nurses can analyze, but it’s sure they can use x-ray.)

        “There’s many more patients than staff, so there’s no way they can block them all from your Doctor.” Well, they do 🙂 Nurse is chatting all day long, I have to go to the hall, call over him to be able to treat the patient, so he goes to another and doesnt stop talking, so when I want to trat that patient I have to do the same go out-call over thing. But thanks to you sometimes he does other things too, so he is less annoying. 😀 But sadly he’s still in the way.

        “Nothing fancy, just small changes to existing stuff – all that is already in the game – the nurses and orderlies already have the autonomy pings to deliver food and stuff built-in, but for some reason the game was just bugged and not working. ”
        Oh I like your mod very much! It’s way better this way than without it, so I wouldn’t call it a small mod. I like it very much.

  8. Thank you so much for still maintaining this mod. I couldn’t play the doctors career without it.

  9. Hi, does this mod use a game resource file: S4_E882D22F_00000003_000000000001BDE2_hospitalExamBed_Patient_Sit_Idle_autonomous?

    1. You’ll have to try it for yourself, I haven’t ever used that mod. It doesn’t sound like it does any of the same stuff though, so I don’t see any problems or issues with features clashing.

  10. Very nice!!!!!!! That’s the mod I was needing. I can’t stand the hospital staff neglecting patients

    1. As far as I know it does. There’s some bugs at the moment that have nothing to do with the mod – for example the X-Ray machine cannot be calibrated. That’s a bug with the game. I put on the Status page if the mod is working with the latest game update (which is the July Cottage Living patch).

  11. So no idea if this is related to Better Hospital Staff or not, but my doctor has no staff except an attending. No clerical, no orderly, nothing. So just FYI for what it’s worth (obviously could be another mod but I can’t imagine what).

    1. I think you must have some other mod causing that, because I took my doctor sim to the hospital and all his other co-workers showed up fine, as well as all the patients.

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