Healthcare Supply Chain Disruption Risks

Abstract

The healthcare industry is essential in all countries worldwide; it plays a vital role in the survival and wellbeing of citizens. To receive the best quality of healthcare, healthcare facilities should have efficient strategies for managing the supply chain. Following such strategies will result in reduced costs and improved quality, efficiency, and flexibility. Nevertheless, the recent events of COVID-19 have shown many flaws in the healthcare supply chain risk management strategies. This pandemic has shown that the healthcare supply chain was not prepared for such disruption and that the traditional supply chain risk strategies followed are restrictive in tackling long-term global pandemic disruptions. Thus, this work aims to propose a framework that identifies disruption risks, understands the varied nature of the disruption, its sources, and its significance. Risks are collected from an extensive literature review and semistructured interviews with healthcare supply chain specialists. Then, survey results were analyzed using Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) to identify interdependency among risks and rank them. This study will provide decision makers an insight into the main risks leading to disruption in the healthcare supply chain field. Moreover, it provides a potential for further exploration by including appropriate mitigation strategies for the proposed framework.