Random set of the day: Hospital
Posted by Huwbot,Today's random set is 7892 Hospital, released in 2006. It's one of 33 City sets produced that year. It contains 382 pieces and 4 minifigs, and its retail price was US$49.99/£29.99.
It's owned by 1994 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
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23 comments on this article
Those ambulances better be for having four wheel drive in order to get up that ramp my goodness that’s steep.
Might have to modify the emergency vehicles with rocket boosters for them even to get to the patient drop off location.
Yeah, it's not a bad hospital, but it seemed an odd decision to use that large raised baseplate (particularly since the design seems like it would work, just fine, on an ordinary flat baseplate). Maybe Lego had a pile of those in the warehouse and needed to get rid of them?
That probably explains the lack of an actual ambulance, as well.
Oh hey a RSOTD that i finally had at one point! This was an interesting set, wish I had kept the raised baseplate to use for other things, ah well. The modern hospital sets (both in Friends and City) are a huge step up from this anyways.
I have the new set and while it is double the cost, I actually prefer to it as when LEGO removed the base and made more than enough with extra pieces and an ambulance.
Huh, I was not aware that the 8x16 tile existed before 2010. After checking BrickLink, I see it was revamped in 2010 as the previous version only had tubes along the perimeter. Neat.
I like the new one (60204) better as well.
Wow, look at the ramp on that hospital. Not only that, the stairs seem pretty steep too... Look of the whole hospital is very uninspired and boring. It's just bad.
Wait, wasn't this set the RSOTD a few months ago?!
I guess this is more like a mountain rescue outpost. This would explain the small floor space, the lack of a proper ambulance and the presence of the ATV and the helicopter.
While there are a lot of older sets that are unsurpassed to this date; this ain't one of them. Buy the current hospital. Quite frankly, from 2007's range of Hospital/EMS Rescue sets; I think the only good ones were the 7903 helicopter and 7890 ambulance.
On another note, it's fire station after fire station, police station after police station; but with hospitals, we're lucky if we get a new one every 5 years.
Such a weird location for a hospital
Hospitals arent popular as a toy. Ambulances, sure.
The location is indeed a bit weird. But I love some of the parts used.
On the whole though the current City hospital is just so much better, especially the minifigure selection.
This is how TLG managed to climb out of those difficult years at the start of this century: keeping costs down. In this case on the healthcare of minifigures. Building hospitals like these, the message was clear: wanna get better? Just try and get here! Soon the picture was clear: nobody actually came to the hospitals anymore, so why build them? Another saving! Shame that minifigs got angry, which caused an explosion of criminality and the need for a lot of police, everywhere.
For me best Lego hospital (they didn't made modular hospital)
Wasn't this, like, the first hospital Lego had made in pretty much forever, at the time? The nineties, if I recall, didn't see a single hospital set in the town / city line; so I seem to remember that made this a pretty big deal when it first came out.
@BionicleJedi, there was 6380 and its smaller cousin 6364. Especially 6380 looked a lot better than this...
So much nostalgia!
One day I will get this set!
6364 is the cutest little hospital TLG ever made.
This is part of LEGO's dark ages, before it bounced back with better sets and better packaging. One of the worst hospitals/medical sets. I think it's possible to correlate uninspiring LEGO with raised baseplates fairly closely.
@T79: Even so, hospitals have never been as ubiquitous in LEGO Town as stuff like police stations, fire stations, airports, service stations, etc.
Oddly enough, I feel like these first couple years of LEGO City may have given some AFOLs kind of a false sense of how big a deal hospital/medical sets are to the City/Town theme, since this set was released as part of a larger "Rescue" wave similar in size to Police, Fire, and Construction waves of the previous year.
But since then, hospital, clinic, and ambulance sets have all been released under the catch-all "Town" and "Great Vehicles" subthemes. And City medical buildings have appeared at a rate of about one every six years, which is in fact a MORE frequent rate than was seen in the Town theme back in the 80s.
I think one of the reasons that hospitals may be so scarce in LEGO City is how "small-scale" medical work often is compared to police, firefighting, or construction work even by human standards. I don't mean small-scale in terms of importance but in terms of the actual amount of space and movement they involve.
Shrink tasks like diagnosing disease, treating a bone fracture, performing a blood transfusion, or administering medicine down to minifig scale and they become almost imperceptible — tasks kids might need to communicate more through their narration than through physical/spatial/tactile interaction with the toy.
That said, I think recent LEGO City and LEGO Friends hospitals have done a PHENOMENAL job with adding plenty of varied play scenarios and play features. I expect to see even more improvement going forward! But I get why scenarios with more "action" in LEGO City, or with a more "everyday" vibe in LEGO Friends, might justify frequent releases in a way that miniaturized hospital play might not.
@jf....very adroit analysis! I worry about my LEGO towns rapid decent into a police state. I have approximately one officer per 10 citizens and enough police helicopters to cover the sky
@gylman: Sets like 6276, 6086, 5988, 6093, etc. all strike me as pretty inspiring.