Analyzation and prioritization of healthcare environment criteria for designing geriatric long-term care private hospitals in South Korea using an analytic hierarchy process

Appropriate decision-making for selecting the suitable planning for geriatric long-term care hospitals (GHs) is critical to address design uncertainties. Previous studies related to GHs have focused on analyzing criteria, but they did not provide the priority of criteria for decision-making. Moreover, GHs should be considered differently from both general hospitals and geriatric long-term care public hospitals. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose healthcare environment criteria (HEC) that guide the design and suggest priorities of each criterion for design decision making that are suitable for planning GHs. First, previous studies were reviewed and relevant criteria were extracted. Next, a group of academics was enlisted to review the proposed criteria. Then, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was employed among healthcare professionals to evaluate the importance of each criterion. This study identifies 7 criteria and 43 sub-criteria as well as provides the priorities of each criterion and sub-criterion. An intelligent system and appealing facility criteria were newly suggested and other sub-criteria were modified to fit the condition of GHs. To ranking each of the sub-criteria from each healthcare provider, the criteria ranked in the top six were all related to safety-related criteria. Accessibility and intelligent system criteria showed large deviations in the corresponding relative importance rates. From the study, a framework of HEC for GHs in South Korea which is different from general hospitals nor geriatric long-term care public hospitals was provided and the strongest-weighted HEC for decision-makers to identify areas of improvement was suggested.