A comparative evaluation of child health care in China using multicriteria decision analysis methods

Child health is an important public health issue in China and the Chinese government always attached great importance to child health care. With the implementation of a series of medical and health reforms in China in recent decades, the status of child health improved year by year. Objectives This study aims to comprehensively evaluate if the measures implemented in the medical and health reforms effectively promoted the development of Chinese child health care in recent years and provide theoretical support for future decision-making on the policies of child health care in China. Methods A total of six indicators were selected from the China Health Statistics Yearbook. Based on the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) algorithm, three different evaluation methods were applied in the study, which are the weighted technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method, the weighted rank-sum ratio (RSR) method, and the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE). Each indicator's weight was calculated by the entropy weight methods objectively. The sensitivity analysis was conducted to validate the stability and accuracy of the rank results. Results The results indicated that the rank values of each year’s child health care calculated by the different evaluation methods were not exactly the same, but the overall trend is consistent which is that child health care in China improved year by year from 2000 to 2020. The top 5 were ranked from 2016-2020 and the bottom 5 were ranked from 2000-2004. Conclusions The results indicated that the policies and measures implemented in the medical and health reforms, as well as improved sanitation conditions, availability of healthy food and water, etc., have jointly promoted the development of child health care in China in the past 20 years, providing a scientific theoretical basis for future policy-making to promote child health care.