A unified approach to evaluate green hospitals’ certification criteria

Abstract

There are many Green Hospitals certification criteria in the industry, depending on the institute that issues the certification. Designers, builders, owners aim to achieve these criteria requirements in their studies but not always consider the end user's perspective. The aim of this article is to determine the most valuable LEED certification criteria, that contributes towards the success of the project after it is built, from the end user's perspective in hospitals with LEED certification in Turkey. The authors hypothesized that easiness and comfort values related to LEED certification criteria are the general values that end-users are looking for in their working environment. In order to determine the most valuable criteria, authors have selected a focus group of people who have working experience in both LEED and non-LEED certified hospitals. First, the Delphi technique is utilized to generate a list of advantages for working at a LEED-certified hospital, and then a shorter list is generated by comparison of the abovementioned list with LEED certification criteria. Finally, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to find out the most valuable LEED certification criteria. The hypothesis has been confirmed with AHP results.