Evaluation of Nursing Homes Using a Novel PROMETHEE Method for Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets

Abstract

Aging has become a serious social problem in China. Traditional informal long-term care is hard to sustain because of the reduction in family size and elders' children migration to big cities. The institution offering services for the disabled elders has been a tendency. There exists a strange phenomenon: Some nursing homes are difficult to enter for most disabled elders, while the other ones must search for elders to maintain operation. Therefore, for the evaluation of nursing homes, two problems should be considered: (1) selecting suitable nursing homes for disabled elders; (2) obtaining the key factors influencing the selection of elders and helping nursing homes improve their services based on the key factors. First, we propose a new DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) method for PLTSs to solve the second problem. Then, we present a novel PROMETHEE (Preference Ranking Organization Methods for Enrichment Evaluations) method to rank the alternatives and make a sensitivity analysis for criteria. Finally, we illustrate our proposed methods to an evaluation problem in Zhenjiang City by a case study. Based on the case study, we can obtain that our proposed methods are effective and practicable.