Contemporary Perspective on Supply Chain Management Regarding Drug Sourcing Shortages

Safeguarding the supply of drugs and satisfying the needs of patients is a strategic priority of any healthcare system especially in these pandemic times. The pharmaceutical supply chain is subject to many pressures including non-availability and shortage of requisite drugs. A drug shortage is a deficiency in the supply of medicines or products that affects the ability of a patient to get the required treatment in due time. The roots of drug shortages are multifaceted, varied, and the issue can be due to supply or demand. However, the situation affects almost every stakeholder in the healthcare system, which is why collaboration is a must to deal with drug shortages. Hence, adopting an exploratory and single-case approach of the largest public hospital in the context of Namibia, the objective of this chapter is to provide a contemporary perspective of supply chain management re drug sourcing shortages, analyze the causes of drug shortages, recommend measures to minimize the crisis, and suggest strategies for enhanced efficiency in drug supply.

Preventing Prescription Drug Misuse: A Regulatory Perspective in the United States, Europe, and India

Prescription medicines, such as analgesics, stimulants, steroids, anti-depressants, psychotropics, and certain antibiotics are commonly mishandled in a variety of ways, including overdosing, abuse, diversion, and drug trafficking. Because of the considerable risk to public health, they are subject to strict regulatory oversight. The drugs possess abuse potential at specific dose and hence prone to abuse therefore they are categorized as Controlled substances. Therefore, they are subject to constant vigilance over the pharmaceutical supply chain. The complete clinical data as well as post marketing surveillance study of such drugs are critical to be in place as per the regulatory requirements. The countries have kept up with the times by constantly updating the system with regulatory laws and strategies to prevent cases of misuse. The current review will give a quick summary of how prescription medications and prohibited substances are regulated in the United States, Europe, and India. It will also emphasize current trends in drug usage, as well as the issues that these countries face and the preventive policies implemented to manage and prevent drug misuse. It will also make recommendations for new regulatory initiatives to address the current drug- misuse-related concerns. As a result, a review of the regulatory system in various countries will present current challenges and new lessons for countries around the globe.

Designing a resilience model for pharmaceutical supply chain during crises: a grounded theory approach

Background During disasters or crises, the traditional models of supply chain encounter failure and skewedness under the inevitable and unknown pressures. The procurement and transformation of required equipment to the involved areas is considered as one of the main triggers of decreasing damages and losses during crisis. In this regard, a breakdown in pharmaceutical supply chain can lead to intensive, undesired consequences. Methods This was a qualitative study applying a grounded theory approach. The study was conducted with attending of 32 informant participants who were qualified in supply chain during natural disasters and crisis. In order to collect the data, deep semi-structured interviews were applied along with investigating the documents, observation, field notes and theoretical memos. For data analysis, a continuous comparison was used according to Corbin and Strauss method. Results Results of the study were categorized in 8 main categories as the main themes. “Wasting” appeared as the main factor of the resilience of pharmaceutical and consumable medical equipment supply chain. Wasting included two subthemes of loss of resources and wasting time. Conclusion In order to make resilience in pharmaceutical and consumable medical equipment during disasters, it is necessary to reinforce the various dimensions of the resilience model to increase the rate of supply chain responsiveness. This study particularly contributes to broadening and deepening our understanding of how to mitigate the risk of undesirable outcomes of pharmaceutical supply chain during the disasters or crises.

Critical Success Factors and Traceability Technologies for Establishing a Safe Pharmaceutical Supply Chain

Drug counterfeits have been an international issue for almost two decades, and the latest statistics show that fake medications will continue to penetrate legitimate pharmaceutical supply chains (PSCs). Therefore, identifying the issues faced by PSCs is essential to combat the counterfeit drug problem, which will require the implementation of technologies in various phases of the PSC to gain better visibility. In this regard, a literature review was conducted to fulfill the following objectives: (i) review the application of traceability technologies in various PSC phases to detect counterfeits; (ii) analyze the various barriers affecting the establishment of a safe PSC and the critical success factors used to overcome those barriers; and (iii) develop a conceptual framework and guidelines to demonstrate the influence of traceability technologies and success factors on overcoming the various barriers in different phases of the PSC. The major finding of this review was that traceability technologies and the critical success factors have a significant influence on overcoming the barriers to establishing a safe PSC.

Influence of Supply Chain Management Strategies on Performance of Medical Supply Chain Organisations in Kenya

Institutions within the medical supply sector have consistently faced substandard supply chain results because of failure of timely deliveries on the part of suppliers failing to quickly respond to deliver medical shipments. This indicates the procurement role having inadequacies as a key component of an organization since it does not deliver on maximized effectiveness and a reduction of costs based on poor supply chain management plans. A critical purpose of the study was the intention to identify influence of supply chain management strategies on performance of medical supply chain organisations in Kenya. More so, the analysis deals with the degree information integration impacts on Organization performance; to evaluate the impact of warehousing on performance; to examine the impact of outsourcing on performance; and to evaluate the influence of lean supply chain on performance of medical supply entities across Kenya. Direction will through be relying on the resource-based theory as well as the supply chain constraints principle. The analysis will adopt a descriptive study approach; with the targeted size comprising of 30 medical supply entities. The study participants included 2,529 staff of pharmaceutical supply chain entities within Kenya. Determination of the sample group was by Yamane’s concept that led to to a group of 345 participants. Accessing the participants was by stratified and simple random sampling approaches. Towards indicating dispersion and central tendency, standard deviation and respectively, with the inferential statistics being analysed by multiple regression and correlation analysis. The study findings reveal that performance of medical supply organizations in Kenya was significantly related with supply chain information integration (p < 0.05), warehousing (p < 0.05) and outsourcing. Despite this, the association among differentiation strategy and performance was insignificant at p > 0.05 but only significant at p <0.1). It was also found that while lean supply chain had a negative influence on performance (t = -.528, p >0.5) information integration, warehousing and outsourcing had positive influence on performance (information integration: t = 16.461, p <0.05; warehousing: t = 19.671, p <0.05; outsourcing: t = 15.528, p <0.05). The result of these outcomes is that the leadership across medical supply organizations in Kenya need to adopt information integration, warehousing, and outsourcing, which would positively contribute to performance. Medical supply organizations in Kenya should continue emphasizing on supply chain strategies. The outcomes of the study may assist organisations in drawing plans or improving existing strategies governing supply chain management across institutions.

Material convergence issue in the pharmaceutical supply chain during a disease outbreak

PurposePharmaceutical donations are a practical approach to increase medicine availability during disasters such as disease outbreaks. However, often donated pharmaceuticals are inappropriate and unsuitable. This convergence of inappropriate pharmaceuticals is a severe operational challenge and results in environmental hazards. This study explores the pharmaceutical supply chains (PSCs) during a disease outbreak to relieve the negative impact of the material convergence problem (MCP).Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a situation-actors-process learning-action-performance (SAP-LAP) linkage framework to understand the PSC dynamics. The problem-solving component of the SAP-LAP analysis provides the strategies catering to MCP. The findings from the SAP-LAP helped to develop the causal loop diagram (CLD). This study conducts several experiments on the proposed strategies by integrating CLD into a stock and flow diagram. Later, a disease outbreak case study accessed the pharmaceutical donations effect on PSC performance.FindingsThe study synthesises and evaluates propositions and strategies to incorporate circular economy (CE) principles in PSC. This study proposed two strategies; one to sort and supply and the other to sort, supply and resell. The reuse policy improves humanitarian organisations' finances in the simulation study. This study verified the operational improvement of PSC by reducing the transport and storage burden due to MCP.Originality/valueThis study comprehensively approaches the issue of drug donation and uniquely produced several propositions for incorporating a CE perspective in PSC. The study also proposed a unique simulation approach to model the donation arrivals in response to a disease outbreak using susceptible, exposed, infectious and recovered modelling.

Logistic planning for pharmaceutical supply chain using multi-objective optimization model

Purpose Appropriate logistic planning for the pharmaceutical supply chain can significantly improve many financial and performance aspects. To this aim, a multi-objective optimization model is proposed in this paper that considers different types of pharmaceuticals, different vehicles with determining capacities and multi-period logistic planning. This model can be updated based on new information about resources and newly identified requests. Design/methodology/approach The main objective function of the proposed model in this paper is minimizing the unsatisfied prioritized requests for pharmaceuticals in the network. Besides, the total transportation activities of different types of vehicles and related costs are considered as other objectives. Therefore, these objectives are optimized hierarchically in the proposed model using the Lexicographic method. This method finds the best value for the first objective function. Then, it tries to optimize the second objective function while maintaining the optimality of the first objective function. The third objective function is optimized based on the optimality of other objective functions, as well. A non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II-multi-objective particle swarm optimization heuristic method is designed for this aim. Findings The performances of the proposed model were analyzed in different cases and its results for different problems were shown within the framework of a case study. Besides, the sensitivity analysis of results shows the logical behavior of the proposed model against various factors. Practical implications The proposed methodology can be applied to find the best logistic plan in real situations. Originality/value In this paper, the authors have tried to use a multi-objective optimization model to guide and correct the pharmaceutical supply chain to deal with the related requests. This is important because it can help managers to improve their plans.