SimCity Strategy Guides
HealthcareHealthcare deals with Sims who become sick or injured. This article covers managing your healthcare and identifying where you need to invest in this expensive social service.
The following sections can be found in this article:
Healthcare NeedsHealthcare is one of the more expensive SimCity services and it can often seem like a bottomless pit of financial need. It is also, however, quite easy to over-expand ineffectively, wasting a lot of money in the process.
As a general note, it is a good idea if you can locate your hospital as centrally as possible in an area which doesn't have a ridiculous amount of traffic (sometimes easier said than done). You may need an additional clinic to cover heavily industrialized areas if your city's population is biased towards low wealth Sims and low tech industries.
Injuries will lead to death if the injured Sims are not collected by an ambulance and brought to a clinic or hospital in time. If you have a high injury rate AND a high death rate then you need more ambulances. The Emergency Center module for the Hospital will extend the time your ambulances have to reach injured Sims before they die by 200%.
Sickness will NOT lead to death, however sick Sims do not work. This means workplaces which have less than optimum staffing levels due to sickness will be less productive than they should be. Sick Sims do actually go to a workplace, hence the workplace aquires the affected by sickness flag, however depending on the number of sick Sims, productivity of the building will be reduced in terms of production output, freight movement, goods sold, services provided etc. Since this affects specialization buildings as well as reducing the happiness of commercial and industrial zones this directly affects your city's economy.
Sick Sims do NOT require ambulances, they will make their own way to a clinic or hospital where they will (hopefully) receive treatment and in time will become healthy again. The Diagnostic Center module for the Hospital (requires School of Medicine plus a research project at a regional university to unlock) will reduce sickness healing time by half.
It is worth keeping in mind that Sims will occasionally get killed by disasters, notably the big lizard, tornado and earthquake (the zombies and UFO will cause Sims to disappear rather than die). Although Sims can also be murdered if your crime rate is high, this doesn't actually affect your deaths per day. Disaster related deaths can't really be helped and no amount of ambulances will do anything about them, because they're already fairly dead by the time anyone might think to call for help!
Reducing InjuriesInjuries will happen at home or in an industrial workplace. Injury rates are dependant on wealth levels and industrial tech levels, so poor areas full of low wealth Sims and low tech industries will have a much higher rate of injuries than high wealth and high tech.
Education is the key to reducing injury and death rates. Schools not only teach Sims to recycle, how to not start fires and to not commit crimes, they also teach them how to put one foot in front of the other without tripping over and hurting themselves. You will also need to invest in higher education, namely a Community College or university, if you want to raise the tech level of your city's industry to make it less hazardous for industrial workers.
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Reducing SicknessSickness is caused by the presence of germs or nuclear fallout. If your town is radioactive after a nuclear power station explosion then you will have persistent sickness permanently (or at least for the next 500+ game years), however germs can be tackled somewhat to reduce sickness rates.
Germs are generated largely by pollution. Ground, air, water, sewage and garbage can all create germy environments so if you have a lot of sick Sims, check your pollution data maps to see what the cause is. This is a complicated aspect of SimCity which combines a wide variety of different factors, as such it is covered in full detail in this seperate article on Pollution & Germs. As per usual this is yet another area where education also helps! Presumably teaching Sims to wash their hands and to not eat chicken when it's still slimey...
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