Hospital site selection with distance-based multi-criteria decision-making methods

Hospital site selection affects hospital’s personnel, resources, environment, and even long term benefit and cost. Such a strategic decision must be made efficiently by considering many conflicting key criteria such as economic, environmental, and technical. In this study, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), EDAS (Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution), and CODAS (COmbinative Distance-based ASsessment) methods which are distance-based Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods are applied to the hospital site selection problem. The weights of the hospital site selection criteria are derived from CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method whereas the complete ranking of the hospital site alternatives is obtained by using TOPSIS, EDAS, and CODAS methods. According to the results of the CRITIC method the most important criterion is ‘market conditions’. The other criteria follow this criterion are cost, transportation, geological factors, land strategy, financial support by the government, environmental consideration, and demographic consideration, respectively. The complete ranking of the hospital site alternatives is also same according to the three distance-based methods. So it can be concluded that these methods can be used instead of each other as an alternative method for the various problem structures and overcoming the disadvantages of these methods.