17TH INTERNATIONAL ISTANBUL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH CONGRESS ON LIFE, ENGINEERING, ARCHITECTURE AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES, İstanbul, Turkey, 28 - 30 April 2024, vol.1, no.1, pp.88-95
Health tourism is a form of tourism that takes place when tourists with different ailments come to
countries with more economical and specialized health personnel to be treated in order to treat their
ailments. Although health tourism is a new field in our country, it is a sector whose importance is
increasing day by day. The problem of health tourists choosing the best one among multiple
alternatives according to certain criteria is a multi-criteria decision making problem. The aim of this
study is to help health tourists who will prefer Kayseri province for treatment to make hospital
selection decisions. In this context, the evaluation of 4 different hospitals (A, B, C, D) in Kayseri
province, which are qualified to provide health tourism services, according to 7 different criteria was
carried out using a new multi-criteria decision making method. Hospital A is the most recently built
public city hospital in Kayseri province. Hospital B is the oldest university hospital in Kayseri
province. Hospital C is a private university hospital in Kayseri province. Hospital D is the Kayseri
branch hospital of a private university with branches in different provinces of Turkey. In the
proposed new method, instead of the weights of the criteria, the importance ranking of the weights
by the decision makers is taken into account. The criteria taken into consideration in the study are,
in order of importance from the most important to the least important criteria, having qualified health
personnel, quality of medical care, availability of modern equipment, affordability of medical
treatment, recommendation, image of the patient household and accreditation. The ranking of the
importance of these criteria was obtained by examining the studies in the literature. The evaluation
of the hospitals was made according to the joint evaluation of the authors, with a minimum score of
1 point and a maximum score of 9 points. As a result of the analysis, it was concluded that the
hospital that can be most recommended to health tourists among the 4 different hospitals considered
for health tourism in Kayseri province is A hospital, which is a private university hospital.