A modified IF-AHP intuitionistic fuzzy FMEA methodology to prioritize maintenance management deficiencies in a health care organization

Maintenance plays a very important role in healthcare organizations. The availability and safety of medical facilities and equipment can affect both patient waiting times for diagnosis, treatment, or rehabilitation, and healthcare and non-healthcare staff when using damaged or malfunctioning equipment by both. This impacts the quality of care and can have adverse consequences for people’s lives. Despite its importance, there is nonetheless an almost complete lack of research focused on continuous improvement that prioritizes failure modes in the field of hospital maintenance management. Furthermore, the literature recognizes that the traditional Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) method has a number of shortcomings when used in real-world problems. Therefore, this research aims to create, for the first time, a classification of failure modes related to continuous improvement in the maintenance management services of a Spanish public general hospital. A modified Intuitionistic Fuzzy FMEA methodology will be used for this purpose, integrating the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (IF-AHP) and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Hybrid Weighted Euclidean Distance (IFHWED) operators, with four different distance measures. This is intended to incorporate the doubts and uncertainties present in real-world decision making. Expected cost has also been included along with traditional risk factors. Subjective weights are provided by IF-AHP, and objective weights are calculated by four different intuitionistic fuzzy entropy measures. The results show that the failure mode identified in the top position is Little or no technical qualifications in management.