Prioritization of Patient Safety Management Performance Assessment Criteria in Healthcare Centers

Unsafe health services are still a widespread global problem. Although significant progress has been made in the last decade, there are still numerous shortcomings and the rate of harm inflicted on patients is unacceptably high. Since the evaluation of medical centers leads to improved performance, increased health, reduced accidents and ultimately increased patient satisfaction as one of the most important stakeholders of these centers, the existence of evaluation criteria is essential. No study was found to introduce and prioritize these criteria.

By reviewing the most important methods of evaluation of healthcare centers, criteria related to patient safety are extracted and their importance is determined using the opinion of experts and through entropy method.

The findings of this study led to the establishment of a database of patient safety management criteria that the health and infection control criteria in all evaluation methods have been mentioned. Finally, the mentioned cases were grouped and prioritized to 19 criteria that the criteria of medical facilities and patient monitoring and patient safety management gained the most important position from the perspective of research experts by gaining weights of 0.0987 and 0.0855, respectively.

In the evaluation methods and studies, different criteria in the field of patient safety management have been presented, the collection and review of which provide a suitable context for the establishment of a comprehensive evaluation method. Therefore, the results of this research can be used for self-assessment, comparison of different centers and thus improving performance.