Do plants, radiators and bins (trash cans) have to be near a patient or an employee to have an effect on them?

Question

Do plants, radiators and bins (trash cans) have to be near a patient or an employee to have an effect on them? Or will just simply placing these items have an effect on the whole area (everywhere outside, if outside; the whole room, if inside a room)? If not, how many tiles does the effect of these items reach? Are their effects different if these items are outside or inside a room?

Asking info for both Theme Hospital, and its updated, open source reimplementation, CorsixTH. If the mechanics are different, please specify the differences.

Answer 1

Radiators certainly do have an impact based on their position. You can check the hospital management screen to see the current temperature of the hospital, and the general map screen shows the reach of the individual radiators. Also, staff (and visitors too IIRC) will have temperature status indicators over their heads which let you know when they're either too hot or too cold. You can move the radiators around to cover the blank spots to keep everyone a decent temperature. (Also, you can increase the temperature of the radiators so that they extend over a greater reach - although this increases the running costs).

As for the bins, plants, I don't have an answer for those specifically. In all my years playing the game (it was quite a while back though) my strategy was just to have at least one plant and one bin per room and provided you have enough handymen to water the plants (and they're not blocked off by furniture) my hospitals usually had good reputations for cleanliness and good status for plants .