Animal Hospital Patients Guide: Behavior and Types

Patients are the core of Animal Hospital (Anomaly) — the whole game is deciding which ones are real animals, treating them correctly, and spotting the anomalies wearing patient costumes. This guide covers how genuine patients behave, every documented patient type, and the class synergies that turn routine care into sanity income.

Personality and moods

Patient personalities vary widely: some introduce themselves formally and politely, some go casual (“Sup, I’m [Name]”), some are shy and withdrawn, and a few are outright bitter. The wiki notes an undercurrent to all of them — given the hospital’s backstory, patients generally come off scared and hesitant.

They also react to how you run your window. Take too long to check a patient in and they grow visibly impatient; stall further and some change their mind and walk out entirely. Rejected patients react with shock and anger before leaving. Even a patient who received their badge may occasionally leave — randomly, or because all patient rooms are currently occupied. The room cap matters here: the maximum number of patients in one shift equals the number of hospital rooms, currently 8.

Movement and the NPC boots

Fresh patients walk slowly — painfully so once queues form. The Supplies Shop sells NPC boots that upgrade patient walking speed, one of the most quality-of-life purchases in the game (speed upgrades stack: the +12% NPC Speed item only appears after +10% has been bought). Walking patients can also drop slime, a green substance that slows anyone stepping in it — a slime trail does not automatically mean anomaly.

Documented patient types

• Regular patients — check in, walk to their assigned room, lie on the bed, and wait for treatment. Wrong treatment kills them; correct treatment sends them out in bandages.
• Lobby sitters — sit in the lobby chairs and never approach the check-in window. They only offer hospital chatter, but Mimics can attack them (and so can you, via taser or gun, which the shift-1 money trick exploits).
• Visitors — check in but stand beside the bed rather than occupying it (or in the connecting room for Rooms 6 and 7). Some bail with “Uhh… actually, nevermind.”
• Critical patients — arrive with a countdown timer; if it runs out before treatment, they die.
• Suffocating patients — walk in hunched over, clutching their stomach. Once admitted, an oxygen meter drains beside their bed and you must pump their oxygen in a minigame to keep them alive.
• Ambulance patients — six arrive at once during the ambulance events every 5 shifts. They are the victims of anomaly attacks, and some of them are anomalies themselves.
• Fish patients — during Rainy Shifts, every patient (except certain NPCs) is a fish, anomalies included.
• Fainted patients — can be carried to their room and cured normally… or thrown into any trash bin, which the game acknowledges with “No one will know…”

Story NPCs like Barney, Ron from Accounting, and Ratthew also appear at the window and can always be safely admitted.

Deaths, rewards, and penalties

A normal patient dying penalizes you — one death drops your shift score to Poor, two or three make it Critical, and Dr. Harlow warns that three animal deaths fail the run (the exact grading rules are in the rating guide). An anomaly dying instead rewards you. Tasing or shooting a real animal costs 15 sanity on top of the score damage.

The upside of patient care is steady income: 2 Animal Coins per patient treated, 0.5 per visitor admitted, and shift pay scaled by performance.

Class synergies

Two classes convert patient flow directly into survival: the Secretary gains +1 sanity for every patient checked in, and the Doctor (or Surgeon) gains +1 for every patient healed. On busy shifts that passive trickle outpaces job stress entirely — the numbers are in the sanity guide, and the full roster is on the classes page.

Spotting which “patients” are not patients at all is its own discipline — start with the how to play guide for the camera and polaroid workflow.