Abstract:
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Nowadays, the supply chain is one of the main support activities. It is a fact that if the
supply chain doesn’t work correctly, so the drugs doesn’t arrive the hospital’s patient,
it cannot be developed the main activity of a hospital, offering healthcare.
Since approximately 50 years ago, some hospitals started investing a lot on research
for new supply change management models. What they were looking for was more
effective ways of drug delivery from the suppliers to the patients.
The new logistic architecture models (highlighting the unit-dose system) were
introduced first in some USA hospitals. As a result of the new supply chain systems
they experimented a decreasing of drug consumption costs, reduction of drug
administration mistakes and, in general, offering a higher quality service to the
patients. With these good results, other American hospitals also implemented the new
system of supply chain management also obtaining positive results.
In our global world, quickly arrived to Europe the news of the good results obtained
with the system implementation in hospitals. Around 30 years ago, the firsts European
hospitals started to invest on the new logistic system. Spain, and specially Catalonia, is
one of the countries that decided to post for the new system and nowadays around
75% of Catalan hospitals use the unit-dose system in healthcare logistics.Nevertheless, nowadays there are still some countries that have a traditional and
obsolete system in healthcare logistics, one example for this is Italy (specifically the
north-west region).
The main aim of this essay is to compare and analyze the supply chain systems in both
Catalan and north-west Italian hospitals. There will be analyzed the positive and
negative aspects of both systems and try to contribute with improvements for both of
them. |