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Supply Chain Management

Marion Allen

Rasmussen College

Healthcare Operations Management

Deborah Ryan

7.22.22

Executive Summary

Significant of stocking

Efficient inventory management is vital for a healthcare organization's effective running. Medical inventory management in hospitals entails the direction of stock used. It covers high and low-value items like a syringe and costly implants and surgical kits (Ahmadi et al., 2019). High-value consumables usually comprise a sizeable chunk of a healthcare facility‘s budget. Therefore, tracking and timely stocking are significant for ensuring efficient service delivery. Furthermore, due to the controversiality of patient healthcare, health inventory ought to be available on demand. Efficient stocking ensures a critical medical list is available when needed (Ahmadi et al., 2019). As such, the facility needs to know precisely the present stock levels, including the location at a specific time.

While gaining a detailed overview of the healthcare inventory is not that simple, the hospital must ensure that they have sufficient stock. Poor stocking compromises efficient service delivery and can put the facility in a precarious situation (Fragapane et al., 2019). Visible data must accompany stock to necessitate easier accessibility of the needed inventory. Stocking will help the facility enhance the quality of care by reducing unnecessary costs and saving on time. In Dr. Smith's scenario, timely stocking would have helped avert the inconveniences caused due to the unavailability of aesthetics.

Importance of placing timely orders

Inventory management in healthcare facilities means the facilities must ensure adequate inventory to meet clients’ needs (Ahmadi et al., 2019). Moreover, in practice, the uncertain nature of hospital operating rooms implies that it is impracticable to foresee every need. Healthcare facilities never know who will walk through their door and what medical conditions they may require. Even in the case of planned surgeries, all decision-making processes are made in real-time. This means that specific or any extra inventory requests can be made instantly (Fragapane et al., 2019). Some recommendations may need a transfer from outside the division or directly from the suppliers. These items are most vulnerable to remaining untracked in the healthcare facilities management system. Therefore, healthcare facilities need to place timely deliveries to avert any inconveniences.

Placing timely orders ensure that the entire inventory required for surgical procedures and emergency cases can be accessed when needed. By placing timely orders, the hospital improves order accuracy and turnaround time. Untimely order requests can lead to a patient receiving the wrong medication leading to undesirable health outcomes and potential malpractice charges.

A step-by-step method to avoid the situation in Dr. Smith’s Office

The hospital can avert the scenario witnessed in DR. Smith's situation by prioritizing an efficient inventory management process. Firstly, the facility must ensure that all the essential items are made available on time and have a back plan to cushion itself against unforeseen situations. The next step is to ensure that products are inspected, sorted, and stored. Reviewing and sorting products ensures that no essential product is missing, and the location of their storage warrants easy accessibility when the item is required (Mandel & Granin, 2018). The hospital must then ensure that inventory levels are monitored. This entails stock taking, inventory cycle count, or perpetual inventory software. By doing so, the hospital will ensure that it does not run out of stock (Mandel & Granin, 2018). The next step entails ensuring that inventory levels are up to date to avoid understocking, which can be supported by reorder points for essential medical items. When the hospital follows this procedure to the latter, the inconveniences triggered by understocking in the hospital will be avoided.

References

Ahmadi, E., Masel, D. T., Metcalf, A. Y., & Schuller, K. (2019). A literature review reviews inventory management of surgical supplies and sterile instruments in hospitals. Health Systems, 8(2), 134-151.

Fragapane, G. I., Zhang, C., Sgarbossa, F., & Strandhagen, J. O. (2019). An agent-based simulation approach to model hospital logistics. International Journal of Simulation Modelling, 18(4), 654-665.

Mandel, A., & Granin, S. (2018, August). Optimization of Inventory Management Process. In 2018 8th International Conference on Logistics, Informatics and Service Sciences (LISS) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.