Improving Safety by Evaluating the Impact of the Supply Chain and Drug Shortages on Health-Systems

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how fragile our healthcare supply chain is with product delays, drug shortages, and labor shortages being exacerbated in recent years. Objective: This article reviews current threats to the healthcare supply chain that impact patient safety and highlights potential solutions for the future. Method: A review of the literature was conducted, and important up-to-date resources associated with drug shortages and supply chain were analyzed to build foundational knowledge. Potential supply chain threats and solutions were then explored through further literature analyses. Conclusions: The information provided in this article helps to brief pharmacy leaders on current supply chain issues and solutions that can be integrated throughout the healthcare supply chain in the future.

Hospital Supply Chain Management: Cross-Disciplinarity Opportunities in the Post-Pandemic Era and Research Agenda

“…Diverse tactics, including cooperation between HSCM partners, the development of redundant suppliers, capacity slack, creation of demand pools, and balancing internal production and outsourcing have been suggested to promote resilience in SC (Alajmi et al, 2021;Hossain et al, 2022). In addition, researchers highlight the importance of Industry 4.0, Communication Technologies (ICTs) like big data, and the roles of analytics and blockchain in improving resilience (Patel et al, 2022;Rashid et al, 2022;Tani et al, 2022). Since HSCM is receiving more attention, the literature is also growing.…”