Healthcare supply chain resiliency

Abstract

This paper communicates an idea that supply chain management is an underlying imperative to organisational resiliency within a healthcare setting. Too often organisations seem to accept the obvious as proof and emotional response leads management to believe perceived regularity and commonality is routine. Instead of looking past gut feelings, leaders instead sometimes allow emotionally driven reactivity to drive decision making despite data and other information guiding organisational requirements in other directions than the way a leader feels. Healthcare supply chain practices and process inefficiencies have been routinely discussed through an industry-specific lens. But how often has supply chain management been examined as a catalyst for organisational resilience? Well studied (and well documented) is the idea that the status quo, among healthcare business operations, is no longer affordable or tenable. By design, then, this work challenges the status quo and expounds upon the impact of incorporating multifaceted, multidisciplinary feedback among a variety of stakeholders. Change is necessary and supply chain professionals are going to have to assert themselves, in an effort to be heard, concerning improvement amid accepted operational practices and processes. Contemporary healthcare organisations are entities within an interconnected, interoperable, complex global environment; contemporary supply chains need to be thought of less as chains and more as webs of interoperable processes amid matrixed departments, sections and sub-entities throughout a healthcare environment. There remains a pervasive need, in many instances, to re-examine existent theory related to supply chain management, operations planning and contingency mitigation.