The Challenges of Hospital Supply Chain Management, from Central Stores to Nursing Units

Sylvain Landry () and Martin Beaulieu
Additional contact information
Sylvain Landry: HEC Montréal
Martin Beaulieu: HEC Montréal

Chapter Chapter 18 in Handbook of Healthcare Operations Management, 2013, pp 465-482 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The practice of patient care is supported by a range of healthcare supply chain management activities, also referred to by many as healthcare logistics. Improving the efficiency of these activities can provide opportunities for healthcare institutions and health systems to increase the quality of care and reduce costs. Hospitals represent a key link in the supply chain and face their own particular challenges due the complexity of their internal supply chain. The distribution of medical supplies to nursing units represents a vital component of the internal hospital supply chain. Indeed, all doctors, nurses, and clinical support staff deal with and depend on supplies in one way or another and are thus affected by their accessibility and availability on a daily basis. The methods most often used to distribute supplies to nursing units range from requisition-based systems that depend on clinical staff involvement to methods where the hospital’s central stores manage inventory and replenishment. In the latter category, common storage and distribution method options include par level systems and automated cabinets, among others, as well as the two-bin/kanban replenishment method, which has been identified as a best practice. For its part, RFID technology has further enhanced this leading practice and introduced the possibility of proactively managing supplies by triggering replenishment rounds based on a range of user-defined criteria. Beyond its expanded benefits, this innovation opens the door to a large number of research avenues in the areas of capacitated vehicle routing problems, inventory optimization, and simulation.

Keywords: Supply Chain; Supply Chain Management; Clinical Staff; Medical Supply; Preference List (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:isochp:978-1-4614-5885-2_18

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781461458852

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-5885-2_18

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Series in Operations Research & Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().