Just-in-time approach in healthcare inventory management: Does it really work?

Enteral nutrition: An underappreciated source of patient safety events

Enteral nutrition (EN) therapies are prescribed for patients not able to maintain adequate nutrition through the oral route. Medical errors and close calls associated with the provision of EN therapy leading to actual and potential patient harm have been reported. The purpose of this study was to determine the number, type, and severity of safety events related to the provision of EN therapies reported to a national database and provide workable recommendations from the literature to improve safety. An interdisciplinary team queried the National Center for Patient Safety (NCPS) Joint Patient Safety Reporting (JPSR) system using keywords related to EN therapy use. The team reviewed the number, type, and severity of reported events and safety codes as categorized by the NCPS and then thematically classified the narratives using the Medication Use Process (MUP). Our query revealed 1227 safety events related to the EN keywords. Thematic analysis of the top five event subtypes (n = 1030) revealed that there were 691 EN safety reports directly related to an MUP step, and the majority fell into the steps of administering (31%), followed by monitoring (28%), dispensing (26%), prescribing (11%), and transcription (4%), with many events involving more than one MUP step. Safety events associated with the provision of EN therapies leading to patient harm have been reported to the JPSR system. To improve safety related to EN use, modifications to prescribing, transcribing/documenting, dispensing, administering, and monitoring of prescribed EN therapies are needed.

Lessons learned from the pandemic: expanding the collaboration between clinical and logistics activities in a hospital

PURPOSE

The Covid-19 pandemic generated significant changes in the operating methods of hospital logistics departments. The objective of this research is to understand how these changes took place, what collaboration mechanisms were developed with clinical authorities and, to what extent, logistics and clinical care activities should be decoupled to maximize each area's contribution?

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH

The case study is selected to investigate practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals in Canada. The pandemic presented an opportunity to contrast practices implemented in response to this crisis with those historically used in this environment.

FINDINGS

The strategy of decoupling logistical tasks of an operational nature from clinical activities is well-founded and helps free clinical staff from tasks for which they are not trained. However, the decoupling of operational tasks should be combined with an integration of the clinical information flow to the logistics hub players. With this clinical information, the logistics hub can generate its full potential enabling better inventory management decisions to be made.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE

The concept of decoupling is studied to identify configurations that offer the best benefits for clinical staff.

Precision Anesthesia in 2050

Over the last few decades, the field of anesthesia has advanced far beyond its humble beginnings. Today's anesthetics are better and safer than ever, thanks to innovations in drugs, monitors, equipment, and patient safety.1-4 At the same time, we remain limited by our herd approach to medicine. Each of our patients is unique, but health care today is based on a one-size-fits-all approach, while our patients grow older and more medically complex every year. By 2050, we believe that precision medicine will play a central role across all medical specialties, including anesthesia. In addition, we expect that health care and consumer technology will continually evolve to improve and simplify the interactions between patients, providers, and the health care system. As demonstrated by 2 hypothetical patient experiences, these advancements will enable more efficient and safe care, earlier and more accurate diagnoses, and truly personalized treatment plans.

Modelling and Analysis of Hospital Inventory Policies during COVID-19 Pandemic

The global coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) started in 2020 and is still ongoing today. Among the numerous insights the community has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is the value of robust healthcare inventory management. The main cause of many casualties around the world is the lack of medical resources for those who need them. To inhibit the spread of COVID-19, it is therefore imperative to simulate the demand for desirable medical goods at the proper time. The estimation of the incidence of infections using the right epidemiological criteria has a significant impact on the number of medical supplies required. Modeling susceptibility, exposure, infection, hospitalization, isolation, and recovery in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic is indeed crucial for the management of healthcare inventories. The goal of this research is to examine the various inventory policies such as reorder point, periodic order, and just-in-time in order to minimize the inventory management cost for medical commodities. To accomplish this, a SEIHIsRS model has been employed to comprehend the dynamics of COVID-19 and determine the hospitalized percentage of infected people. Based on this information, various situations are developed, considering the lockdown, social awareness, etc., and an appropriate inventory policy is recommended to reduce inventory management costs. It is observed that the just-in-time inventory policy is found to be the most cost-effective when there is no lockdown or only a partial lockdown. When there is a complete lockdown, the periodic order policy is the best inventory policy. The periodic order and reorder policies are cost-effective strategies to apply when social awareness is high. It has also been noticed that periodic order and reorder policies are the best inventory strategies for uncertain vaccination efficacy. This effort will assist in developing the best healthcare inventory management strategies to ensure that the right healthcare requirements are available at a minimal cost.