Nurse-Task Matching Decision Support System Based on FSPC-HEART Method to Prevent Human Errors for Sustainable Healthcare

To increase the levels of sustainability of service quality as well as to ensure satisfaction and assurance of patients in the health sector, minimizing the probability of making mistakes nurses is of great importance. The extent of this probability is considerably affected by task types, physical conditions of the working environment, workload, and working conditions. Moreover, the physical and mental characteristics of nurses also have a colossal influence on this probability. It is also possible to increase the sustainability of health services by matching nurses appropriately to a specific task according to related risk levels, and by balancing their workload accordingly. This study proposes FSPC-HEART method in that purpose, as a new type of human error reduction and assessment technique (HEART) application based on fuzzy step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis and principal component analysis methods. Unlike the methods in the literature, this new method offers a person-specific proactive error prevention approach. With FSPC-HEART, the probability of each nurse to make a mistake, that is, the human error probability (HEP) values are calculated separately for each task. Also, the combined effect of physical and mental workload factors for each employee was taken into account. In the proposed method, the effect of the subjective judgments of the decision-makers on the objectively obtained HEP values was tried to be reduced. The developed nurse-task matching decision support system enables the FSPC-HEART method to be easily used by decision-makers, and to assign employees to tasks with low error probabilities.