Risk assessment using a novel hybrid method: a case study at the biochemistry department

Risk management has gained substantial attention for the health sector in recent years. Healthcare systems are forced to deal with risk assessment due to deadly accidents. Biochemistry department is one of the most critical units, in which occupational accidents should be controlled preventively. Thus, this paper aims at developing a risk assessment process to minimize the occupational accidents. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and 5x5 matrix (L Matrix) as most effective quantitative risk analysis methods, are developed for a biochemistry department of a hospital in Turkey to evaluate the risk types discussed in related works and discovered during this work. First, the decision makers’ risk evaluation based on historical data of accidents are adopted to risk management process. Then, with regard to scoring of risk factors such as occurrence, severity and detectability, risk priority numbers and classes are obtained and preventive measures for the high-risk failure modes are determined. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been applied for prioritizing these measures to reduce or eliminate these risk types. Considering the results obtained from the AHP method, a goal programming model is developed to minimize the risk prevention costs. Obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.