Howdy! We’ve made some major changes to the hospital and asylum and wanted to update all of you on what we’ve been doing. This project began by gathering specific feedback from patients as well as former and current hospital staff. Believe it or not, executing this list of changes took three people, plus many helpers, nearly two months to develop, polish, and publish and it still only represents first steps toward making the hospital and asylum the RP destinations they can be.

Thank you to the following people for providing your inputs on how medical RP could be made better: Titi, Ming Yheng, Xelan Yheng, Barley Alsop, Kendall Alsop, Shade Manx, Jack Jameston, Rhyssa Panther, Lyss Ritter, Rhoslyn Ritter, Magnum Vectoscop, Vanora Blackheart, Eve Romana, Sarah Angelo, Alice Lambert, and more who I’ve almost certainly lost track of. Sorry if I missed you on this list!

Special thanks go to Ming Yheng (assisting in proof reading), Lyss Ritter (assisting in proof reading), Shade Manx (revamping Hospital/Asylum/PD work flow), Marty Kells (revamping Hospital/Asylum/PD work flow), Tarra Thornton (revamping Hospital/Asylum/PD work flow), Kendall Alsop (revamping Hospital/FD work flow), Madison Montana (Event DJ), Eve Romana (daily article support), and Braeden Daughtry (customizing our new mesh scrubs).

Our biggest goal is attracting and retaining staff because the lack of staff availability precludes many attempts at generating role play. As such, many of our changes have been internally focused and will be transparent to you. I’ve prioritized the changes to list the ones likely to affect you first.

We do have one thing to ask you, the community, to change. A lot of characters have developed affinities for certain doctors and nurses. While we do blush and appreciate those votes of confidence, role play will be much smoother if we can be more open to working with whoever is online. We’ve beefed up our guidance on what sort of information should be in the charts to make that change in habit easier on all of you. By all means role play with the staff member of your choice, but we ask that you keep in mind how hard it is for a brand new interns to role play when many cases go to the few players who have developed a following.

1. We’re refocusing on follow up care.
We have new internal policies that prohibit removing patients from the patient roster until we’ve placed in-character phone calls to offer playing out follow up care. This addresses feedback from patients that medical role play is one-dimensional and from staff that have nothing to do except wait for people to stagger through the doors. There is a catch to this: our roster system was never really designed to track contact and follow up. Therefore, you may be contacted more than once. Please don’t bite the head off an intern because it’s the second (or third, or fourth) call you have received. Players should only be contacted when they are online so we don’t contribute to IM capping.

2. Contacting hospital staff.
You can now use the DE role play group, the same one you use for 911 calls, to role play the paging of hospital staff. Having one solid way to contact all hospital players, just like we have for PD and FD, will help put players in touch with staff and get role play moving. We’ve also made changes to the NPC chart so that it now includes a list of staff who have volunteered to advertise their usual online times. This directory will help you match up with the staff who are online when you are. While all of this is great, our primary goal is to beef up staffing in general so that NPC chart note cards and directories will be used less often overall.

The staff directory can be found by clicking the drop box located in the hospital lobby.

3. Clearly defined PD and FD work flows.
Until now, the PD, FD, Hospital, and Asylum all functioned in silos and each groups players had different notions as to the way things ought to be working. Things are now defined and are being communicated within each group as needed. There are two big changes here: we now have agreement for permitting people to be both EMTs and hospital staff and, the PD and Asylum have new policies IC forbidding each other from crapping on role play. Asylum docs visiting the PD are IC forbidden from speaking about jail conditions and PD players visiting the Asylum are IC forbidden from intervening as a result of Asylum conditions. This allows both groups to partake in their darker themed role play with some additional protection for the assailants. It is also the first step toward reciprocity which, we hope, can grow between the PD and Asylum so that everyone gets more interaction.

4. We’ve developed new role play!
One of the biggest hurdles to retaining staff in the hospital is the boredom of waiting for patients. Unlike a bar or restaurant, players only come into the hospital after something particular happens to them in other role play. We have put forth three new styles of medical role play to help diversify the medical role play experience and make it more proactive. We have provided our players with guidance on performing medical demonstrations out in the SIM, setting up health screenings with other businesses/groups, and rolled out a medical experimentation play that doesn’t require injuries prior to playing. Most importantly, our orientation card describes each of these plays loosely and encourages hospital/asylum staff to get creative with these ideas and to experiment with ideas of their own. The power is in the hands of our staff to play the way they want to and not just be hemmed into waiting for role play to come to them.

We are also geared up to launch a storyline with the lawyer groups to encourage bad behavior and (unnecessary treatments, drugging, gropes, rapes, etc.). We also developed the Men’s Rights Movement invitation. When I originally wrote that, it was designed to be focused on hospital players… but then Cara was nice enough to take the DA job and put a female in the lead of every single pseudo-political position in DE. TL;DR: we are striking out on new paths so you can play with us in ways aside from the classic “I have an owie, make me better” role play.

Internal changes you probably won’t see but will benefit from:
1. All new orientation materials.
Our old welcome materials were from 2012 and contained loads of incorrect information. This has been entirely revamped and has been expanded from about one page of information to thirty. We also organized the notecard so that only the most important information (about three pages, not counting a screen shot based tutorial) is at the top with everything else provided as secondary resources. Anyone who had ever used the hospital charting system gave the feedback that figuring it out was a pain in the ass. I wrote up a tutorial that provides a mock role play example and then gives step-by-step instructions (with actual screen shots) showing new players how to go from their role play to creating a chart to viewing that chart to, finally, discharging a patient.

With the new materials we have also expanded the guidance on the information to document in patient charts. This will help staff hand patients off between each other and continue the role play with whoever is present.

2. New, expanded, ranking structure.
The new ranks provide clear definitions on moving up the chain of command and explain what kind of privilege is afforded at each tier. Higher rank players will be empowered to author, disseminate, and run their own medically themed stories with the support of hospital leadership. That isn’t to say that lower ranks can’t also author stories, but that those players who have shown their knowledge of medical role play in Dead End will be afforded more freedom to blaze a trail in their own way.

3. Mesh scrubs!!!!!!
Authentic, no-fooling, gourmet mesh scrubs are here! Several people created alts and invested 100% into mesh bodies…. Only to find out our classic avatar scrubs were incompatible. This put the onus of finding scrubs that matched our DE color coded dress scheme onto players, not to mention the expense of acquiring the new scrubs. Players should never have to pay Lindens as an entrance to role play and this is now fixed.