Hospital Preparedness Assessment against COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study in Turkish Tertiary Healthcare Services

Hospitals play a critical role in providing essential health services to people in the healthcare system. Healthcare systems around the world have faced some issues in responding to patients with various disease severity levels. Nowadays, the world as a whole is combating a pandemic called COVID-19. This pandemic causes an increase in the disease spread with fluctuated patient demand that may affect the hospitals' capacity and overall functioning and risks rising based on hospital site, medical staff, patient, and healthcare process. To deal with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals must have completed their preparations before these events occur. Therefore, this study proposes an integrated approach based on the decision-making concept with interval-valued spherical fuzzy sets (IVSFSs) to the hospital preparedness assessment problem. A technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) extended with IVSFSs is used to rank hospitals from Turkish tertiary healthcare services. A checklist reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) is adapted to conform to Turkey's COVID-19 pandemic management. Ninety-nine subcomponents of the adapted checklist under ten components are weighted by interval-valued spherical weighted arithmetic mean (IVSWAM) operator. The hospitals in the problem are then ranked concerning these weighted subcomponents. With the proposed approach, a COVID-19 pandemic preparedness index is determined for the observed hospitals. In addition, a separate index based on each main component (component-based ranking) is determined. These indexes are vital indicators in determining in which aspects hospitals are ready and in what aspects hospitals are not prepared for pandemics. The proposed approach can be adaptable and applied by national policymakers in assessing all hospitals of the country against the COVID-19 pandemic.