A Meta-Analysis of Health care Supply Chain Performance for Patient Safety

Abstract

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had a huge impact all over the world. Healthcare industry is one that has been greatly affected by Global supply chain disruption, including shortages of critical medical equipment and drugs, insufficiency of diagnostic, and inadequacy of medical personnel. The aforementioned problems directly affect human health in the dimension of “patient safety” which may cause life-threatening situations. Therefore, it is important to learn how to strengthen the healthcare supply chain (HSC) and increase safety, particularly for patients. There are various researchers who studied HSC performance in developed countries but the research in developing countries especially southeast Asia countries e.g., Cambodia is scarce. Therefore, this research aims to identify and synthesize HSC performance for patient safety and provide a novel model of HSC performance in developing countries' healthcare settings. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) was conducted using a patient safety definition from WHO, International Patient Safety Goals from Joint Commission International (JCI), and the Hospital Accreditation institute (HA) from Thailand. The HSC performances are categorized under the easily recognizable heading SIMPLE (stands for patient safety goals in 6 domains as follows: Safe surgery, Infection Prevention & Control, Medication safety, Patient care process, Laboratory & blood product safety, and Emergency preparedness and response). The novel model of HSC performance for patient safety is provided to demonstrate the factors that can enhance the performance of HSC management in developing countries. Moreover, this study contributes to the meta-analysis by analyzing existing research and proposing new future research opportunities in HSC performance for patient safety that leads to social sustainability.