Health Commodities Inventory Management Performance and Challenges in Selected Public Health Facilities of South Gondar Zone, Amhara Region, Ethiopia
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Date
2023-02
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Introduction: Assessing inventory management system effectiveness has always been a
crucial task in health-care organizations in order to discover and close gaps. In order to
demonstrate inventory management performance fully in this research area, none of the
prior studies analyzed integrated both financial and non-financial measuring variables
from different perspectives.
Objective: To assess health commodities inventory management performance and challenges
in selected public health facilities of South Gondar Zone, Amhara Regional State, Ethiopia.
Methods: A facility-based cross-sectional descriptive study, following a concurrent mixed
method approach with both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, was done.
The study included 18 health facilities or 30% of the 57 health institutions or study population.
Expert opinions were added to learn about the interdependent links of indicators in the
decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory technique. The numeric data was input and
analyzed using Microsoft Excel, while the qualitative data was thematically evaluated.
Results: The average prescription fill rate and affordability utilizing prospectively selected
1800 prescriptions at selected health institutions were 84.36 %± 5.08 and 1.6 ±0.39,
respectively. During the 2012 EFY, the majority of surveyed health institutions 15(83.33%)
used emergency orders at least once. During the 2013 EFY, however, nearly all 18 (100%) of
the selected health institutions used at least two emergency orders. According to the study, the
average inventory accuracy rate in the study area was 71.33 % ±9.63, and the average wastage
rate of selected health commodities was 1.59 % ±1.25 in 2019/2020 and 1.78 % ±1.33 in
2020/2021, resulting in a total loss of 750,398.78 ETB. In the qualitative part of the study
majority of participants believed that there is insufficient short and long-term training and
supervision to fill employees' skill gaps, which helps to improve inventory management
performance. The most influential performance indicators, according to the classical decision-
making trial and evaluation laboratory approach, was the frequency of emergency orders, with
R+C values of 3.52 which is associated to more indicators.
Conclusion: This investigation discovered that the frequency of emergency orders is the most
important indicator, and any responsible bodies should pay more attention to reducing it in
addition to implementing other sound inventory management operations to build a strong
health care delivery system.
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Keywords
Challenges, Commodities, Facilities, Health, Inventory and Performance