When: 11-14 June
Where: Century City Conference Centre, Cape Town, South Africa
The people running health supply chains have been driven to the top of the agenda of this year’s SAPICS conference with workforce development featuring heavily across the programme.
This year’s 45th edition will encourage discussion on the topic forward thinking supply chains: What will the supply chains of the future look like and what technologies and skills will we need to have in place to manage them? How do we empower the people who have to manage them?
SAPICS organiser Jenny Froome is excited about the breadth of voices at this year’s conference: “This year we’re bringing the public and private sectors together like never before.
“We’re hoping the panel discussions, presentations, workshops and networking opportunities will help the 800+ participants learn from one another and lead to collaborations that will benefit the supply chain workforce, health systems and ultimately populations on the African continent.”
SAPICS is the first of a trio of supply chain conferences to be held over the next few months. The Global Health Supply Chain Summit will be held from 14 to 16 November in Nairobi and will continue the theme of people in supply chains with a focus on Sustainable and resilient supply chains for equitable access to healthcare. The PtD Global Indaba will then go even further next March in Bangkok and delve into workforce solutions to transform health supply chains.
PtD and professionalisation
How to professionalise the health supply chain workforce will be the question PtD’s executive manager Dominique Zwinkels will be looking to answer on Tuesday 13 June at 8:30. She will join a panel moderated by Management Science for Health’s Andrew Brown, which will feature Rebecca Alban and Dauda Majanbu from VillageReach, and Azuka Okeke from Africa Resource Centre for Excellence in Supply Chain Management as well as Lungelwa Kunene from Roche South Africa
Entitled Getting practical with supply chain professionalisation the discussion will centre on the supply chain workforce and the main pillars to institutionalise supply chain management as a profession in the public and private sectors.
What else to look out for
There will be some familiar faces in the workshop Private sector engagement for resilient health supply chains at 15:00 on Sunday 11 June. VillageReach’s Alvaro Lopes, Kasha’s Kiersten DeHaven, USAID’s Ed Nagle and Africa Resource Centre’s Ed Llewellyn will offer strategies to leverage the private sector’s financial resources, technical expertise and innovative solutions.
On Tuesday 13 June at 14:35 PtD champions Pretty Mubaiwa (ARC) and Pamela Steele (Pamela Steele and Associates) will join SAPICS president MJ Schoemaker in a panel discussion on practical solutions to target gender equity in the supply chain workforce.
On Sunday 11 June Andrew Brown will host a workshop on how to systematically strengthen pharmaceutical systems to support health effectiveness, which will focus on a systematic approach to achieve public health goals.
Visit the SAPICS website to view the programme and to register.
