Determination of Weights for Health Related Quality of Life Indicators among Kidney Patients: A Fuzzy Decision Making Method

Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) is one of the significant current discussions in the health fraternity. It encompasses
multidimensional indicators and serves the purpose of evaluating health quality among patients. Patients’ perceptions of the
impact of disease and treatment and the indicators such as physical, psychological, social function and well being are normally
investigated. However there is no clear suggestion of which indicators contributed more than others. The arbitrary nature
of HRQoL paves the way for fuzzy theory in evaluation of indicators. This paper describes the application of a fuzzy decision
making method in ranking indicators of HRQoL among kidney patients. Four experts in health fraternity were selected as decision
makers to elicit information regarding health related status of chronic kidney disease patients over eight HRQoL indicators.
The decision makers were required to rate the regularity of experiencing health-related problems in linguistic judgment among
the patients. The five linguistics variables were used as input data to a modified version of Fuzzy Simple Additive Weight
decision making model. The modified six-step method was possible to tap the extent of decision makers’ opinions on the severity
of HRQoL experienced by the patients. It is shown that the indicator of role-physical recorded the lowest problematic level
while the indicator of mental health recorded the highest problematic level experienced by the patients. The ranking signifies
the impact of the indicators to health quality specifically the chronic kidney disease patients.