Analysis of an emergency service for universal design principles with heuristic evaluation and fuzzy multi criteria decision approach

Efficiency of emergency health services have an important place in the organization of health services. In terms of design, the efficiency of these services depends heavily on benefit from emergency services by people. Accordingly, with the implementation of universal design principles in emergency services, these structures will enable to be used comfortably by a large part of the population. In this study, the usability of a private hospital emergency service was evaluated in terms of universal design principles. Firstly, universal design problems in the emergency service was identified by using heuristic evaluation approach for usability analysis. Secondly, critical universal design problems were found by applying the Fuzzy Delphi method for the problems identified as the result of heuristic evaluation. In the third stage, in accordance with multi-criteria decision making structure, critical problems were defined as subcriteria and associated with the relevant universal design principle which represents the main criteria. Fuzzy DEMATEL method was applied to the decision hierarchy and the sub criteria that should be primarily improved have been defined by considering the relations between the criteria. According to the results, the problems identified in the first three ranks, the elevator button design, the elevator emergency button, the position of the floor signboard were determined as problems that should be primarily focused.