A multi-criteria decision-making approach for prioritizing factors influencing healthcare workers' safety performance: A case of a women's hospital

Abstract

This study was designed to examine the influence of organizational and individual-level factors on the safety performance of healthcare workers at a women's hospital. Healthcare workers in different occupational groups enrolled in the current study. A questionnaire was used for data collection, and the data were analyzed using an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The entropy method was applied to prioritize influential factors, including safety climate, perceived organizational support for safety, perceived supervisor support for safety, safety voice, organizational resilience, and individual resilience, and the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) was employed to rank the alternatives (healthcare workers in different occupational groups). The finding of the entropy method illustrated that perceived organizational support for safety and organizational resilience had the highest influence on healthcare workers' safety performance. The other most influential factor was individual resilience. Regarding safety performance components, safety compliance was more important than safety participation. TOPSIS results suggested that radiologists, nurses, and midwives experienced higher safety performance levels than the other occupational groups in the study women's hospital. The findings of this study demonstrated that organizational and individual-level factors such as safety climate, perceived organizational and supervisor support for safety, and resilience-related factors significantly influence healthcare workers' safety performance, and compliance with safety rules and procedures is essential to achieve better safety performance.