Procurement for health care service requirements: Securing services and maintaining timelines during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The ongoing global spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic had led to health care requirements which are labour and resource intensive to manage. This has led to acute shortage of medical essentials, in almost all countries of the world with increased demand for healthcare supplies at a time when there is a simultaneous disruption in the supply chain. The pandemic has shown beyond doubt that none of the countries in the world from high income to low- and middle-income countries had ready mitigation strategies to handle such a pandemic, with overwhelming shortages leading to loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. New practices and procedures have been created by making modifications within the existing framework of procurement norms, with extraordinary emergency powers to facilitate emergency purchases. There is a continuous and ongoing urgent requirement to procure various essential items, all within a short time frame, which may not be available with the regular or a single vendor. This has to be balanced and judicious, being carried out under extremely tight deadlines, and pose major challenges to maintain inventory control of critical goods required to keep the required humanitarian services up and running.