A three-way decision-based model for occupational risk assessment and classification in the healthcare industry

Abstract

Nowadays, occupational health and safety risk assessment (OHSRA) has gained more importance since occupational hazards can cause loss of life, injuries, delays, and cost overruns in an organization. The OHSRA is a critical activity for identifying, analyzing and reducing the potential occupational hazards arising from workplace for corrective actions. In this study, a new OHSRA model is proposed for the risk assessment and classification of occupational hazards by utilizing the criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) method and three-way decision (TWD). First, the 2-tuple linguistic variables are utilized to express the complex and uncertain risk assessments of occupational hazards provided by experts. Second, an extended CRITIC method is employed to compute the weights of risk criteria by considering their interactions. Then the TWD is improved to determine the risk classifications of occupational hazards by considering their correlations. Finally, a practical case in the healthcare industry is provided to illustrate the feasibility and strengths of the proposed OHSRA model. The results show that the proposed OHSRA model can generate more credible risk classifications of occupational hazards and offer a flexible way for analyzing the risk of occupational hazards.