Determining the Best Maternity Hospital by Using a Fuzzy Decision Making Model

Abstract

<jats:p xml:lang="en">Despite having child brings great responsibility, people want to have a child instinctively. In the context of childcare, parental responsibility requires that children should be born in good conditions and grow healthy and happily. Parents’ first responsibility is to ensure that children born in a healthy way. Nowadays, pregnant women visit doctor regularly and monitor the infant development. There are too many doctors and hospitals working in obstetrics area. The increasing number of alternatives and selection criteria makes it difficult to find a compromise solution in terms of conflicting selection criteria. Therefore, using analytical methods becomes necessary while making the decision of hospital choice for pregnancy follow-up. The main aim of this study is to develop a decision tool for determining the best hospital for pregnancy process. Because of the existence of linguistic evaluations in the decision process, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process is used in this study for determining the best alternative. An application of a real world problem is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology. Within the presented application weight of hospital selection criteria and priority values of five predetermined alternative hospitals in Ankara are calculated are determined. The obtained results of the study shows that staff quality and technical conditions are the most important criteria for hospital selection.</jats:p>