Establishment and application of an index system for prevention of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis: a Delphi and analytic hierarchy process study in four state-owned coal enterprises of China

ObjectiveTo explore the difference of cumulative incidence rate of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (CWP) among four large state-owned coal enterprises in northern China, we created an index system for evaluating the quality of comprehensive measures against CWP and applied the system to evaluate and compare the measures of the four coal enterprises.MethodsA two-round Delphi investigation was conducted to identify the indicators in the index system. The weight values of the indicators were calculated with analytic hierarchy process methods. Measures of CWP, mine annals, records and other information in each coal mine of the four enterprises were collected. The evaluation scores, which ranged from 0 to 100, were calculated and compared with.ResultsA three-grade index system with 3 first-grade indicators, 9 second-grade indicators and 44 tertiary-grade indicators was established. The expert authority coefficient (Cr ) was 0.75 and the Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (Kendall’s W) was 0.15 (χ2=193.30, P