Measuring Health Security Performances of European Union Countries: An Application with MAIRCA Method

Abstract

By analyzing their own and each other's health security performance, countries can develop strategies and methods to increase their health security performance. Therefore, it is important to provide the said performance measurement in order to raise awareness of the health security performance of the countries. In this context, the health security performances of the European Union countries were measured by the MAIRCA method over the values of the Global Health Security Index (GHSI) components for the latest and current 2019. In the research, the relationships were calculated between the health security performance values of the countries determined by the GHSI and MAIRCA method and some multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods (ARAS, BTA, COPRAS, EDAS, MAUT, ROV, TOPSIS, WASPAS, Gray Relational Analysis). According to the findings, it was determined that the first three countries with the highest health and safety performance were Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark, while the first three countries with the lowest health and safety performance were Bulgaria, Romania and Cyprus. In the study, it was also observed that the countries of Bulgaria, Czechia, Cyprus, Croatia, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Greece were below the average health protection performance value. Accordingly, it has been concluded that these countries need to increase their health safety performance in order to be in compliance with other European Union countries on health safety. Apart from these, it has been determined that GHSI and MAIRCA methods have significant, positive and very high correlations with each other and with other MCDM methods except MAUT method. Therefore, according to this finding, it was evaluated that GHSI and MAIRCA method could be explained with each other and with other methods except MAUT method.