Top three pieces of work - Part 2

Part one can be found here.

Drugs and Lab Reagents Supply Chain - This is quite a large areas and I'l break it down to smaller sub tasks.

a.) Supply Chain Rationalisation - There are currently 4 different supply chains in the country. Each supporting or buffering various health centres. In the current system some sites are covered by multiple supply chains, which means budgets are not being spent efficiently, while others have no support.

These supply chains needed to be aligned with the health centres to ensure optimal coverage for all facilities.

My role in this piece of work has been to analyse the past trends in ARV consumption rates, order rates and estimate the change in average monthly consumption for each of the supply chains and informing them on how much of each formulation to order to ensure there are no expiries or stockouts.

b.) UNITAID donation - Read-up on UNITAID here and here. I manage this donation for Uganda and supply all 2L and paediatric drugs in country to the 4 supply chains mentioned above. This includes forecasting national need for paediatric and 2L drugs, placing orders and clearing these shipments. ARV consumption trends tend to vary based on uptake of national guidelines and I revise the forecast every 3 months to ensure it matches consumption rates.

c.) Lab quantification - If quantifying the national need for ARVs is tricky, doing it for lab reagents and consumables is near impossible. Not all patients get the recommended tests, not all facilities do all the tests and not at the same rate or not with the same coverage. Sites are poor at ordering lab reagents so we cannot use consumption rates or issues to accurately predict future need. Even the consumption rates of these reagents vary based on test numbers, number of days a machine is run, batch sizes and number of tests per patients.

One of my tasks is to work with the Ministry of Health to quantify national need, identify available sources of funding, measure gap in funding and finally advise the government on what quantities to order for various lab platforms. Modelling this has been (is) quite a challenging task.