What Have We Learnt About the Sourcing of Personal Protective Equipment During Pandemics? Leadership and Management in Healthcare Supply Chain Management: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Introduction: During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic there have been much publicised shortages in Personal Protective Equipment for frontline health care workers, from masks to gowns. Recent previous airborne pandemics provide an opportunity to learn how to effectively lead and manage supply chains during crisis situations. Identifying and plotting this learning against time will reveal what has been learnt, when and, significantly, what can be learnt for the future.Aims: (i) To identify the temporal trajectory of leadership and management learning in health supply chain management through pandemics and (ii) to identify leadership and management lessons to enable the resilient supply of key items such as PPE in future pandemics.Methods: We undertook a scoping review in line with PRISMA (scoping review extension) searching Business Source Premier, Health Business Elite, Medline, ProQuest Business Collection and PubMed. Search terms were focused on recent airborne pandemics (SARS; Ebola; Zika virus; H1N1 swine flu, COVID-19), supply chain management, PPE, leadership, learning, inhibitors and facilitators and resilience e.g., SARS AND supply chain* AND (“personal protective equipment” OR PPE) (leaders* OR manage*) Titles and abstracts were downloaded to Endnote and duplicates removed. Two authors independently screened all of the titles and abstracts. Inclusion criteria focused on leadership and management in health supply chains during pandemics, peer reviewed or grey literature (either from business journals or reports): exclusion criteria included not in English and not focused on a named pandemic. Once interrater reliability was assured, authors completed a title and abstract screening independently. Ten percent of the resultant full text articles were screened by both authors, once agreement was reached the full text articles were screened independently noting reasons for exclusion. A data extraction tool was designed to capture findings from the final articles included in the review.Results/Discussion: We found 92 articles and, after screening, included 30 full text articles. The majority were focused on COVID-19 (N = 27) and most were from the USA (N = 13). We identified four themes related to leadership and management of pandemic PPE supply chains, (i) Leadership and management learning for pandemic PPE supply chain management, (ii) Inhibitors of PPE supply chain resilience during a pandemic, (iii) Facilitators employed to manage the immediate impacts of PPE supply chain demands during a pandemic,and (iv) Facilitators proposed to ensure longer term resilience of PPE supply chains during pandemics Our study suggests there has been limited leadership and management learning for PPE supply chains from previous pandemics, however there has been extensive learning through the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons included the importance of planning, the significance of collaboration and relationship building. Resilience of PPE supply chains was reported to be dependent on multiple levels from individuals to organisation level and also interdependent on (i) sustainability, (ii) the practise of PPE and (iii) long term environmental impact of PPE suggesting the need, long term, to move to a circular economy approach.

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

“…Another focus of the studies analyzed corresponds to macro logistical processes: 8% correspond to procurement, where studies on PPE forecasting (Best and Williams, 2021;Gonzatto et al, 2022), supplier selection (Pamucar et al, 2022), and analysis on public procurement during the pandemic (Harland et al, 2021). About 3% of the studies are related to storage, location of inventory (Rastegar et al, 2021), and PPE inventory tracking and control (Means et al, 2020), 12% are related to distribution, formulating scheduling models to optimize transportation of PPE, vaccines, and wastes (Ash et al, 2022;Bala et al, 2021;Göçmen, 2022;Goentzel et al, 2022;Gonzatto et al, 2022;Kargar et al, 2020;Tirkolaee et al, 2021); use of drones to deliver drugs (Banik et al, 2022;Koshta et al, 2021) and a study (2%) related to internal production logistics focusing on the implementation of process modularity at HSCM (Saïah et al, 2022).…”

“…Also, Hospital Supply Chain Management: Cross-Disciplinarity Opportunities in the Post Operations and Supply Chain Management 15(4) pp. 47 -61 © 2023 research suggests that SC practices are potentially advantageous to resilient performance in hospitals (Best and Williams, 2021;Davis et al, 2022;Govindan et al, 2020;Sawyer and Harrison, 2022). However, due to its novelty, research on HSCM post-pandemic is still in its development.…”

Pocket-sized, wireless-Bluetooth ultrasound system to perform diagnostic and low-complexity interventional procedures in bedridden patients during the COVID-19 pandemic: from intensive care unit to domiciliary service?

“…Transhepatic gallbladder drainage was performed by two interventional radiologists with appropriate personal protection equipment for standard, contact, and airway precautions (Fig. 1 ) according to the World Health Organization recommendations [ 7 ]. Several diagnostic ultrasound examinations and ultrasound-guided interventional procedures such as pleural or peritoneal drainage (Fig.…”

Resilience and Protection of Health Care and Research Laboratory Workers During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: Analysis and Case Study From an Austrian High Security Laboratory

“…Lessons learned from previous endemic diseases such as Ebola (MacIntyre et al, 2014a,b;CDC, 2015;Diarra et al, 2016;McLaws et al, 2016;Durski et al, 2017;Reidy et al, 2017;DuBose et al, 2018;Mumma et al, 2018Mumma et al, , 2019Lockhart et al, 2020), Crimean-Congo-Fever, Zika (Patel et al, 2021), SARS (Drosten et al, 2003;Rota et al, 2003;Berger et al, 2004) and MERS (Bermingham et al, 2012;Corman et al, 2012) were rediscovered and cited, and found their way into measures deployed to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission, underscoring the importance of proper use of PPE (Best and Williams, 2021;Lippi et al, 2020;Pillai et al, 2021;Verbeek et al, 2020) conclude that learning about the sourcing of PPE, supply management, leadership, learning and resilience was limited but has been increased by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic regarding the importance of planning, collaboration and relationship building. They add that "Resilience of PPE supply chains was reported to be dependent on multiple levels from individuals to organization level and also interdependent on (i) sustainability, (ii) the practice of PPE and (iii) long term environmental impact of PPE suggesting the need, long term, to move to a circular economy approach" (Best and Williams, 2021).…”

“…The role of supply chains, equipment procurement, and the dependency on manufacturers and suppliers of PPE components, disinfectants, and laboratory material was grossly underestimated by healthcare systems and research organizations (Burnett et al, 2022). HCWs and RLWs faced the additional situation of global delivery stops and delays of several months for PPE components in the early stage of the pandemic (Antonini et al, 2021;Best and Williams, 2021;Kothakonda et al, 2021;Ogbuoji et al, 2021;Pillai et al, 2021;Plana et al, 2021;Weaver et al, 2021;Loibner et al, 2021b). The three major problems of PPE unavailability, unprecedented rise in prices and maintenance of safety are described in Table 4.…”