Assessment of patient satisfaction with the hemodialysis experience using an integrated decision-making approach with rough numbers.

Patient satisfaction is a critical dimension of healthcare quality and hospital management, particularly in chronic treatments such as hemodialysis, where patients undergo frequent and time-intensive procedures. Assessing patient satisfaction is inherently a multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problem that involves both subjectivity and uncertainty, which many existing approaches fail to address adequately. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a novel patient satisfaction assessment framework that integrates rough numbers with the best-worst method (BWM) and the gained and lost dominance score (GLDS) method. A comprehensive criteria system for evaluating hemodialysis experiences is developed through literature review and expert consultation. Rough numbers are employed to represent the linguistic and uncertain judgments of patients and experts, while the rough BWM determines robust criteria weights and the rough GLDS ranks hospital alternatives by considering both overall and criterion-level performance. The proposed method is validated through a case study of five hospitals in Jinan, China. The results confirm that the framework produces reliable and interpretable rankings, identifies Hospital A as the best-performing institution, and demonstrates robustness under sensitivity analysis. These findings highlight the value of the rough BWM-GLDS method as a practical and transparent tool for evaluating patient satisfaction in healthcare services.