The Question of Quality Ordering of Health Commodities in Tanga Region, IMPACT Approach Becomes Relevant Driver to the Answers

Abstract

The effective delivery of integrated health services depends on the extent to which the six pillars of a health system as recommended by WHO are adhered to such as adequate human resources for health, service delivery, financing, health system governance, information, quality medicines and technologies. However, to improve supply chain management leading to uninterrupted supply of medicines and other health commodities, the use of data to inform all parts of the health supply chain logistics system, that include product selection, forecasting, quantification, procurement, storage and finally distribution of health commodities, is very important. Previously, Tanga Region had been facing a number of health supply chain issues such as delays in reportingfrom health facilities, a high number of orders for overstocked and no-demand health commodities, unnecessary higher expenditure on health commodities and a high rejection rate for the same R&R rejection reasons. Soon after the introduction of the IMPACT approach in the region, the IMPACT team at the regional level adopted some innovative data-driven strategies at its regular meetingssuch as regular data extraction and analysis to review indicators, monitoring timeliness of reporting as well as data quality, monitoring stock orders to avoid expiry dates, and sharing feedback with councils to take action to address identified gaps. These efforts resulted into decrease in the values of reordered overstocked and not in demand health commodities, massive improvement in terms of reporting timeliness from 76% in January 2022 to 99% in January 2023 and slight increase in the availability of essential health commodities. This study found that improving reporting timeliness and supply chain data quality is a cornerstone towards uninterrupted supply of health commodities and reduced health commodities wastages. Since IMPACT Team techniques has been vital in the identified supply chain improvements then it is an approach that can be applied to improve other supply chain indicators and reduce wastages. Despite the marginal improvement in the availability of health commodities, this study recommends the use of facility formulary-based approach in the calculation of health commodities availability to increase the validity of the results.