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Warm greetings for the New Year from the People that Deliver!
Call for Board Nominations: PtD is in search of four new board member organizations. Please see end of newsletter for details. Deadline to apply is February 28, 2017.
Join the new Technical Working Group and actively collaborate on country interventions.
To sign up, please send an email.
In this month's Newsflash:
- Latest publications from MIT, USAID, Village Reach, and others.
- Stories authored by PtD members representing Baylor Children's Foundation Tanzania and Gaël du Châtellier from UNICEF WCARO.
Do you have a compelling supply chain story which you would like to share with the broader PtD community? Send your suggestions to
info@peoplethatdeliver.org.
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MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics.
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A voice from the PtD community: Baylor College of Medicine Children's Foundation
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Consumption of pediatric ART is a challenge in Tanzania for which the National AIDS Control Program (NACP) has expanded access of pediatric ART through strengthening various tiers in pediatric HIV treatment cascade, including adopting WHO guidelines to initiate ART for all HIV positive children, adolescents and adults regardless of all other criteria as well as provide regular viral load check-up. As ART coverage expands to reach more children, various challenges have been encountered, most notably the unavailability or shortages of pediatric ART.
Since 2011, the Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation Tanzania has had active presence in Mwanza and Mbeya providing comprehensive pediatric HIV care and treatment services free-of-cost to children and adolescents living with HIV in the Lake and Southern Highlands Zones of Tanzania. The program also aims to strengthen pediatric HIV care and treatment to nearby regions through capacity building activities, outreach services, mentorship, and supervision of best practices for pediatric HIV services.
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To manage supply chain management of all the essential products needed for our services, we aim to improve and sustain quality communication on medication shortages, near-to-expire, over-stock and stock-outs to zonal hospitals, regional hospitals, district hospitals, Medical Stores Department (MSD), Logistics Management Unit (LMU) and with other implementing partners. When challenges arise, we offer solutions to assist in supply chain logistics where necessary to support provision of timely goods and services especially when redistribution of commodities is needed.
Part of our success in being a high functioning, high user of pediatric
antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the country can be credited to our innovative team efforts, specifically where pharmaceutical technicians have been empowered through task-shifting of leadership roles in high volume pediatric HIV/AIDS pharmacy. The task-shifting of this type has needed close supervision of the technicians by pharmacist-in-charge through a weekly responsibility check-list performed by each technician as leader of the unit which may have been performed by pharmacist-in-charge. Another aspect of this management includes close monitoring of pediatric ART at clinic level through multi-disciplinary team meetings and using a basic drug supply tracking form; in our case this has been twice weekly for all priority commodities.
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The monitoring we conduct is documented at every meeting on the notice board for the entire pharmacy team to follow through and to allow for constant reminder of stock status, critical shortages, action items, and display of possible achievements.
Lessons from our experience have shown that despite facing difficult situations with the availability of ART countrywide due to limited human and material resources, interventions with clear communication channels can help improve product selection, procurement, clearance, storage, distribution and, most importantly, redistribution while preventing burn-out situations of pharmacists through engaging technicians into active leadership roles.
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LMIS Landscape Project- Identifying Challenges in West and Central African Countries: UNICEF WCARO
Gaël du Châtellier
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Effective supply chain management depends upon rapid flows of quality data which is acted upon. Today, countries face significant challenges in collecting quality data, as well as in effectively understanding the collected data, analyzing it and using it for decision making and continuous improvements.
This limits both the validity and visibility of performance indicators at all levels. Given these challenges, implementation of the supply chain strategy involves supporting countries to improve information systems to measure and improve performance on vaccine management
(GAVI Supply Chain Strategy)
.
This aims to assess the readiness of the existing information systems to manage and monitor the supply chain as requested in the comprehensive Effective Vaccine Management (cEVM). It identifies the needs in human capacity building, and hardware and software to develop an improvement plan to strengthen the Logistics Management Information System(LMIS ) used in West and Central African countries.
The secondary objectives are to minimize the time spent for health personnel on reporting and to improve the performance of the supply chain through better circulation and use of information.
Among the 24 countries covered by Unicef WCARO, the assessment was conducted in 20 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, DR Congo, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo) where teams have spent 10 days in average to assess all levels of the supply chain (140 health structures).
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A back office that allows to integrate and compute results from assessments has been developed along with a front office to display data gathered during assessments on the
web platform.
Visitors can now explore in French and English the scores of the region and of specific countries on the 6 performance indicators: technical infrastructure; LMIS infrastructure; perceived effectiveness; functional coverage; workload and EVM; D4M compliance.
A comprehensive analysis was developed for the regional level and will be soon circulated. It shows a number of bottlenecks to LMIS enhancement that will need to be lifted. Among them we can cite: the hardware architecture that is often undersized, the use of paper systems is prevalent, the information systems that do not compile with SOPs for EVM, and do not collect the required data for the production of indicators required to monitor activities, an important amount of entries that are duplicated in several systems, etc.
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Call for PtD Board Nominations
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PtD is in search of four new board member organizations representing the following constituencies:
- governments or other representatives of low and middle income countries
- academic/research/training institutions
- professional associations
All nominations are welcome.
To nominate your organization, please submit the nomination form via email by February 28, 2017.
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Contact People that Deliver via
email
and connect with us:
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