Risk and resilience in healthcare supply chain management

Abstract

This paper examines risk and resilience through a lens of healthcare supply chain management and business continuity planning. Given contemporary considerations of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, healthcare supply chain management is experiencing new levels of disruption and urgency, requiring leaders to reconsider extant approaches to operational readiness posturing. Developing and inculcating strategic and agile supply chain factors and processes into organisational operations planning toward appropriately responding to complex disruptive supply chain events requires revised understanding, emphasis and modelling. Rational decision making must be applied in the context of problem solving and preparedness. While organisations continue to perceptibly play ‘whack-a-mole’ with supply chain resilience and risk management/mitigation, a better approach may be to align operational readiness with more definable, developed planning approaches. This paper presents five evolving concepts that should entice supply chain leaders to re-examine risk and resilience from a business continuity of operations perspective aligned with business and customer impact analyses, urgency and frequency of needs, and the feasibility of designed support models. Nascent theory development guided the paper’s writing. Development of this work involved a qualitative synthesis of literature associated with healthcare supply chain management, which tends to be underrepresented in academia as a specified genre of supply chain management. While no named theory is introduced within this paper, there may be similar underpinnings from other authors and readers’ curiosity may be piqued when considering an array of concepts closely aligned with three salient perspectives: technological advances’ influence on healthcare supply chain operations; forecasting and implications associated with longstanding, potentially misaligned application of just-in-time within healthcare; and supply chain amplifications (resulting from poor demand management methods in many instances) amid extant practices and processes. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.