For someone who has grown up with the NHS, politics is an inescapable concern here, from the very start of the game's gleeful opening scene, in which a surgeon walks heroically into an operating theatre and readies a chainsaw, before refusing to operate when the patient's credit card is declined.Įven when you ignore the strange landscape of private medical insurance, Theme Hospital can't help but make you think about the real world, because healthcare remains the ultimate political cat-toy, cherished and knocked about by the whims of people who ultimately don't rely on it very much. One of the miraculous things about Theme Hospital, seen from these early weeks of 2018, is how confident it is in navigating the political ramifications of its milieu. (Obviously, it would be years until my sister and I discovered that Jeremy Hunt had been watching us through a window the whole time and nicking all of our management ideas.)

And when our careful negligence was done, we would hand control over, so that the new player could inherit an embattled shell of a thing: understaffed, underfunded, and utterly under-appreciated. And then? Then we would step away and let the simulation run for a good long while without any more input from us. We would employ excellent doctors and excellent nurses, and knock up a ward, a staff room, a toilet block. One of us would take the reins - an easy enough level, say Sleepy Hollow or another one of the early stages - and would build out the basic skeleton of a working organisation. Home from university, my sister and I had a very particular way of playing Theme Hospital.

Obviously, I'm talking about healthcare administration. Years ago, holidays belonged to my only true passion.

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