Performance evaluation for hospital facility management: literature review and a research methodology

Underpinning the quality of health services is a wide range of facilities services that require effective management. With the importance of such facilities management (FM) increasingly recognized, research on healthcare FM has grown, with many that attempted to develop some performance frameworks or key performance indicators (KPIs) for hospital FM. A credible scheme that is tailored for evaluating the holistic FM performance of hospital buildings, however, is yet to be seen. In order to establish such a performance evaluation scheme, a research project was initiated. A review of the literature germane to hospital FM and the groundwork completed by the research team, based on which the project was formulated, is reported in this paper. The research methodology of the project and the five stages of rigorous research work, including a multi-pronged approach to data collection, the method for processing the data with an analytic network process (ANP) and the steps for establishing the intended evaluation scheme, are also described.