Before the Surge
A confirmed disaster buys you a little time before the ambulances arrive. Now you can spend it — open Staffing Setup from the protocol checklist, clear the patients off the board, and stock every room before the first one shows up.
When the scene confirms a major incident, you get a short window before the ambulances show up. It’s the quiet stretch that ends up deciding a lot, and now the game lets you use it.
The Disaster Confirmed message lays the protocol out as a checklist: report the manager, declare the alert, then Allocate staff. Tap that last step and the board flips into Staffing Setup. Grab people from the Staff Pool, drop them onto each room’s bench, and set the floor up the way you want it before the surge.
A few things change while you’re in there:
- Patients disappear — you see rooms and the Staff Pool, nothing else, so you’re planning coverage instead of reacting to whoever’s already in front of you.
- The clock keeps running — this isn’t a pause. Whatever time you spend in here, you spend for real.
- Shortfalls go quiet — with the patients hidden, the wards stop nagging about gaps. Park someone and they just read as spare; only Triage keeps its minimum.
When it looks right, hit Done and you’re back in play. You only open it once, so it’s worth getting right — and the game notes that you staffed up before the first patient arrived, ready for the debrief. From here, the protocol has one step left: clearing the beds already in the ED before the casualties do.