Recognizing dissimilarities between resilience engineering and EFQM approaches to ensure safety in hospitals

A common ground between resilience engineering (RE) and European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) model is to address safety issues. However, the advent of RE may adversely become inefficient or may be regarded redundant if there is no clear uniqueness with RE. This study aims to achieve a clear distinction between the perspectives of RE and EFQM model to address safety issues, using a questionnaire-based comparative approach, in a large hospital. The paper contributes to the scientific field by enabling the comparison using an integrated approach of fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP), simulated annealing (SA), and clustering techniques. Fuzzy AHP provides assessment scores of RE and EFQM. The SA identifies the RE items having the least correlation with the EFQM ones. Finally, the identified RE items are categorized by k-means clustering into a set of unique healthcare-focused RE factors to help healthcare practitioners have a clear understanding of RE concepts and principles.