Occupational health and safety performance measurement in healthcare sector by integrated multi criteria decision making methods

The importance of occupational health and safety is increasing in Turkey, day by day. It is essential to examine the positive and negative effects of legislative changes, implementations of new management systems and the occupational health and safety performance trainings. In addition, when a company wants to receive a servive from another company, it is vital to know the occupational health and safety state of candidate companies. There is no objective and practical OHS (occupational health and safety) performance measurement method that can be used quickly in the mentioned situations above. The methods in the literature measure OHS performance of single enterprise by long-term observations with high expertise requirements. In this thesis, a new method of measuring OHS performance for the healthcare sector has been developed by using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods. First, OHS performance indicators were determined and these indicators were weighted by AHP method. Then, both the PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations) method and the GRA (Gray Relational Analysis) method have been applied in order to examine the consistency of the performance during calculation of performance indexes. After the performance indexes were determined, the results of the two methods were compared and then the correlation between OHS performance indexes and other variables was examined. At the last stage, radar diagrams, which visually shows strong and weak indicators for each alternatives, are given. Implementation of the developed method was carried out in 27 hospitals in İzmir and İstanbul. Of these, 5 are private hospitals, 19 are state hospitals, and 3 are university hospitals.