Fuzzy MCDM Model for Selection of Infectious Waste Management Contractors

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains are under pressure to drive down costs because of digital business, shifting customer needs and new competition. Medical waste generated from medical facilities includes medical activities and daily-life activities of patients and their family members. According to statistics of the Department of Health Environmental Management, Vietnam currently has more than 13,500 medical facilities, including hospitals from central to provincial and district levels and private hospitals and medical facilities. Preventive medicine generates about 590 tons of medical waste/day and is estimated to be about 800 tons/day. Medical waste includes ordinary medical waste and hazardous medical waste; in which ordinary medical waste accounts for about 80%–90%, only about 10%–20% is hazardous medical waste including infectious waste and non-infectious hazardous waste. This is an environmental and occupational health issue that needs attention in developing countries like Vietnam. Handling large amounts of medical waste to ensure environmental and personal hygiene, doing so inefficiently creates potential hazards to the environment and increases operating costs. However, hospitals lack objective criteria and methods to evaluate and select the most optimal infectious medical waste, relying instead on their own subjective assessment and prior experience. Therefore, the author proposed a fuzzy multicriteria decision making (MCDM) model including Fuzzy Analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and the Weighted Aggregated Sum-Product Assessment (WASPAS) for infectious medical waste contractors’ selection in this research. The proposed Fuzzy MCDM method is in-tended to provide a more efficient, accurate method in the selection of infectious medical waste contractors than subjective assessment methods, thus reduce potential risks to hospitals. The results of this study can be applied to evaluate and select contractors in other industries.