Research on the location decision-making method of emergency medical facilities based on WSR

Abstract

The need for emergency medical services increased drastically during disaster relief. Poor location selection of emergency medical facilities may harm the interests of healthcare workers and patients, leading to unnecessary waste of costs. It involves multiple stakeholders' interests, a typical multi-criteria decision-making problem. Based on multiple-criteria decision-making technology, most current location selection decisions methods comprehensively consider the evaluation criteria of "issue" and "problem" simultaneously and establish mathematical models to achieve the results. Such methods are difficult to take into account the influence of different attribute factors on the final location selection results in practice. Therefore, in this study, we used the WSR methodology as a guide to divide the factors of location selection into "Wuli", "Shili" and "Renli", and proposed the WSR methodology-based multi-criteria decision‐making (MCDM) framework for selecting the appropriate location for emergency medical facilities. The integrated framework consists of the Entropy Weight Method, Best–Worst Method, and interval type‐2 fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methodologies. Combined with the comparative analysis of actual cases, the results under the guidance of this framework were consistent with practicalities. Also, the sensitivity analysis showed that the location selection ranking fluctuations were not apparent with the fluctuation of criteria weights. Wherefore, the validation of the proposed method's effectiveness, feasibility, and robustness was proved, which provided a valuable reference for the location selection of emergency medical facilities.