A new paper published in the Global Health Science and Practice journal argues that the health supply chain management (HSCM) workforce should be professionalised in order to raise the capacity of the workforce and health supply chain systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The Supply chain management professionalisaion framework, the paper argues, is integral to helping countries improve their supply chain performance more quickly.
The paper is the first of many to be published in a supplement entitled The Supply Chain Workforce: The Foundation of Healthy Supply Chains.
A gap in health supply chain management skills and expertise
It is well understood in that the health supply chain personnel managing and delivering essential medicines and other health commodities require substantial technical and managerial capacities to operate complex supply chain systems effectively. In many LMICs, though, an adequate supply of workers with the competencies required for effective HSCM is not available.
In LMICs, the staff assigned to HSCM positions are almost always clinical staff who have received only short-term training in HSCM. Many countries mandate that staff managing health commodities have a medical certification but very few countries regulate or have established standards in education or experience for HSCM professionals, and there are no formal requirements that define supply chain competency.
All of this affects supply chain performance and ultimately limits populations’ access to health commodities.
According to Andrew Brown, Senior Principal Technical Advisor at Management Sciences for Health and co-author of the paper: “Health supply chains should be managed by professionals with the skills and qualifications to do so; we’ve known for a while that there is a real gap in the skills and expertise necessary to develop the capacity of the health supply chain workforce.”
He added, “We knew we needed to develop a framework to support governments, employers of HSCM workers and training institutions to remedy the imbalances in the HSCM labour market in low- and middle-income countries.”
A framework to professionalise the health supply chain workforce
The Supply chain management professionalisation framework considers all the stakeholders needed for a country to develop a pool of adequately-qualified and skilled workers.
People that Deliver’s Richard dos Santos, who was instrumental in the development of the framework, explained, “We started by speaking to a sample of SCM professionals responsible for the supply of health products and they indicated a strong interest in having an SCM professionalisation framework, and provided suggestions for what should be included.”
The foundational tool of the SCM professionalisation framework is the Library of Competencies and Designations. Central to its development was an understanding that a detailed description of HSCM competency requirements across job maturity levels was needed to improve the supply of and demand for SCM workers.
To begin to help governments and SCM employers translate the behavioural competencies into roles and job descriptions within their organisations, PtD developed a reference guide of Collection of Roles and Job Descriptions for Health Supply Chains. The Mapping of Education lists the relevant qualifications and certifications required of supply chain workers. The implementation approach, meanwhile, methodically guides countries along the five steps of the professionalisation journey.
“We designed the framework to respond to every area of the labour market: public and private health supply chain organisations and the education sector. All of these will need to collaborate to increase the supply and demand, of qualified HSCM workers,” said dos Santos.
Countries will see results
Establishing health supply chain professionals as an occupational group can benefit employers by continuously producing a pool of appropriately skilled workers. It also benefits workers by creating a career path and sense of prestige, which fosters motivation and increases the retention of a skilled workforce whose efforts contribute immensely to improved SCM outcomes, the most important of which is the increased availability of health products.
Bridget McHenry, senior organizational development advisor, Commodities Security & Logistics, USAID, said, “We expect that by creating a systematic implementation approach with standardized tools that enable the process of professionalization to begin, country teams and implementers will yield results more quickly.”
“We have already seen in a number of countries, including Rwanda and Nigeria, that the framework provides a basis for all relevant stakeholders in a country to work together.”
