Title: Performance measurement of intensive care services in hospitals: the case of Barbados

Authors: P.K. Dey, S. Hariharan, A.Y. Kumar, H.S.L. Moseley

Addresses: Operations and Information Management Group, Aston Business School, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK. ' Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, The University of the West Indies, Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Trinidad, West Indies. ' School of Clinical Medicine and Research, The University of the West Indies, Barbados, West Indies. ' School of Clinical Medicine and Research, The University of the West Indies, Barbados, West Indies

Abstract: The Intensive Care Unit (ICU), being one of those vital areas of a hospital providing clinical care, the quality of service rendered must be monitored and measured quantitatively. It is, therefore, essential to know the performance of an ICU, in order to identify any deficits and enable the service providers to improve the quality of service. Although there have been many attempts to do this with the help of illness severity scoring systems, the relative lack of success using these methods has led to the search for a form of measurement which would encompass all the different aspects of an ICU in a holistic manner. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multiple-attribute, decision-making technique is utilised in this study to evolve a system to measure the performance of ICU services reliably. This tool has been applied to a surgical ICU in Barbados; we recommend AHP as a valuable tool to quantify the performance of an ICU.

Keywords: intensive care units; quality of service; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; performance measurement; Barbados; healthcare; ICU performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTM.2004.006274

International Journal of Services Technology and Management, 2004 Vol.5 No.5/6, pp.579 - 595

Published online: 13 Feb 2005 *

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