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A Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory approach to analyse risk factors related to environmental health and safety aspects in the healthcare industry

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Abstract

In healthcare firms, environmental health and safety (EHS) remains as a vital factor as healthcare products pose very intricate problems related to environment safety. The different similar and dissimilar risk factors that prevail in the system have complicated known and unknown causal relationships that are difficult to understand and interpret. Hence, improving the EHS remains as a challenge in healthcare industry. A research study is carried out utilizing the data (in conjunction with expert’s opinion) and conditions of a healthcare firm in India to categorize and obtain the prominent risk factors based on identifying the most adverse causal relationship among them. A Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (fuzzy DEMATEL)-based approach is designed and employed to assess and rank different EHS risk factors. The trapezoidal fuzzy membership function of the model facilitates better learning of interrelationships in spite of the prevailing vagueness in the causal relationships between the risk factors. The outcomes (the decisive risk factors) out of the experimentation using the proposed methodology strongly coincide with the actual causes of the EHS factors during the last one decade. As the proposed approach is found to be very effective in fixing the causal relationships and ranking among the risk factors, this may be successfully employed in similar healthcare firms/industries for finding out their respective decisive risk factors.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, Krishnankoil, 626126, India

    R K A BHALAJI, S BATHRINATH & S SARAVANASANKAR

  2. Faculty of Manufacturing Engineering, Universiti Malaysia, 26600, Pekan, Pahang, Malaysia

    S G PONNAMBALAM

Authors
  1. R K A BHALAJI
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  2. S BATHRINATH
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  3. S G PONNAMBALAM
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  4. S SARAVANASANKAR
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to S BATHRINATH.

Appendices

Appendix A. Questionnaire

Note: A questionnaire is framed for the intention of performing survey among the experts to assess factors affecting EHS in healthcare industry as part of this research work. The collected data will be used only for educational/research work. The data acquired through the survey will not be shared with others at any point of time. The data collected will not be disclosed in social media as well as the competitors in the same field. For this research work, I will genuinely thank if you spend your precious time for giving rating. Your involvement will immensely aid me to attain the positive goals of my research work; in addition, your experience, ability and skill in the field will contribute towards importance addition to this work (table A1).

Table A1 Fuzzy linguistic scale used in this research.
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Please tick any one of ratings that you feel suitable for each item (see table A1)

figure b

Appendix B

The fuzzy assessment data provided by the experts for pairwise comparisons between key risk factors of Environmental Health and Safety in healthcare industries. See appendix tables B1, B2, B3 and B4.

Table B1 The fuzzy assessment data provided by Expert 1.
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Table B2 The fuzzy assessment data provided by Expert 2.
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Table B3 The fuzzy assessment data provided by Expert 3.
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Table B4 The fuzzy assessment data provided by Expert 4.
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BHALAJI, R.K.A., BATHRINATH, S., PONNAMBALAM, S.G. et al. A Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory approach to analyse risk factors related to environmental health and safety aspects in the healthcare industry. Sādhanā 44, 55 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-018-1050-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-018-1050-4

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