Functional medicine and vaccine supply chain systems are indeed the backbone of quality healthcare services. Efficient pharmaceutical supply chains ensure consistent availability of high-quality medicines, vaccines, and health products at health service delivery points in the most cost-effective and timely manner.
They not only guarantee the delivery of appropriate health products to the end-users, but also provide critical information on the need, demand, and consumption of products, contributing to better service delivery. Thus, they are critical for achieving one of the major targets of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3—access to safe, effective, quality, and affordable essential medicines and vaccines, for all.
Unfortunately, although the importance of supply chain management is widely acknowledged, medicine and vaccine supply chains in most low and middle-income countries like those in Africa face significant challenges that limit access to quality essential medicines.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that robust, efficient, and effective pharmaceutical supply chains are an integral component of resilient health systems. Africa must therefore take on this challenge as a top priority in the health sector and urgently develop innovative and cost-effective strategies to strengthen the supply chain.
Challenges of medicine and vaccine supply chain in Africa
The medicine and vaccine supply chain is one of the most complicated as it relies heavily on infallible temperature control, meeting stringent border regulations across regions, and logistics systems that assure the integrity and security of the products throughout the entire process.
A single loose link in the supply chain could render essential medicines unusable or even potentially dangerous, exposing patients to the risks of substandard and falsified medicines, with negative effects on public health.
The challenges associated with medicine and vaccine supply chains in Africa range from poor infrastructure, weak policy or regulatory implementation, and infiltration by substandard or counterfeit medicines to others such as stock-outs, poor supply chain practices (e.g., poor inventory, poor forecasting, etc.), and inadequate human resources, amongst other factors.
The vaccine supply chain particularly depends on cold storage. Unfortunately, substandard vaccine storage facilities have been identified as a major challenge in many African countries, with several health facilities lacking basic infrastructure.
Another major issue for vaccine supply chain management in Africa is the unstable power supply, which leads to variability in temperatures of the vaccines, and ice packs are often inadequate to maintain optimum temperatures in the cold chain.
Innovative strategies to strengthen medicine and vaccine supply chain in Africa
The complexity of these challenges demands a multi-stakeholders’ approach involving policymakers, public and private sectors, and financial institutions to develop and implement innovative solutions that can tackle these issues. In view of these, Bloom Public Health recommends the following strategies to strengthen the medicine and vaccine supply chain in Africa:
Using screening technologies for post-marketing surveillance: Screening technologies (STs) as invaluable tools in the medicine supply chain for post-marketing surveillance of medicine quality. STs rapidly detect counterfeit medicines in the field, employing significantly fewer resources than those of traditional quality control confirmatory technologies, and increase the number of samples that can be tested.
They are handy tools that enable regulatory authorities and pharmacists to identify and remove nefarious suppliers from the supply chain. Thus, reducing the incidence of negative reactions and illnesses from low-quality medicines.
In Nigeria, Bloom Public Health in partnership with the University of Michigan and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), is carrying out a validation study of two commonly used screening technologies for combating counterfeit drugs.
Leveraging public-private partnerships (PPPs) to complement public sector efforts: PPPs are essential to help overcome the financial, technical, and human resources limitations in the medicine supply chain. A good example is the partnership between Bloom Public Health and the Ebonyi State Government in Nigeria for the Ebonyi Health Supply Chain Transformation (EHSCT) Project.
Read also: Is Africa’s supply chain AI ready?
The EHSCT project will implement an innovative healthcare supply chain system in Ebonyi State, that will ensure the availability of quality and affordable essential medicines across all health facilities in the state.
Ebonyi State will leverage on Bloom Public Health’s expertise and experience in the areas of product selection, quantification, procurement, warehousing, inventory management, distribution, LMIS systems, human resources for supply chain, supply chain financing, supply chain risk management, supply chain governance and coordinating systems/platforms, pharmacovigilance, amongst others.
Adoption of technology-enabled systems to expedite last-mile delivery: In the last decade, Africa has seen an increase in the adoption and use of last-mile aerial drug delivery. Drone delivery services have proved effective in addressing the difficulties in transporting medicines to health facilities, particularly in remote areas with poor road networks.
Bloom Public Health’s partner, Zipline, has transformed healthcare worldwide through automated, on-demand delivery using drones that travel up to 100 km per hour at a time, reducing delivery time from hours by road to minutes. In Africa, Zipline is currently operating in Rwanda, Ghana and Nigeria.
In Conclusion: A resilient healthcare system requires the consistent flow of affordable, good-quality medicines, vaccines and other medical products at every level of the health service delivery points. Africa must therefore address the critical bottlenecks restricting the movement of essential medicines from manufacturers to end-users to achieve better healthcare and progress towards universal health coverage.
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