Enablers of Vendor Managed Inventory in Public Healthcare Sector; Addressing Pharmaceuticals Stock-Outs in Kenya and Tanzania: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Pharmaceutical stock-outs are major challenge facing public healthcare sector in Kenya and Tanzania. Many preventable deaths especially in rural communities have been witnessed due to lack of essential medicines for high-risk diseases such as Malaria in public healthcare facilities. The stock-outs of medicines continues to occur even as central medical stores in East African countries at the end of each financial year report billions of financial losses resulting from expired drugs at their central warehouses. An effective inventory replenishment strategy such as Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) by central medical stores applied at each public healthcare facility is capable of preventing pharmaceutical stock-outs in government hospitals. This paper, basing on Principal Agent Theory conducted a systematic review of VMI enablers in public healthcare sector. The study was driven by the motivation to recommend a solution that can increase the continuous availability of drugs in public health facilities in East African countries. To this end, the study used a group of six key words to search through Science Direct, PubMed bibliographic databases, and Google scholar search engine for peer reviewed articles on VMI implementation in public healthcare sector. The results found by keywords were reviewed, non-relevant articles excluded, and eight articles were selected, analysed, leading to finding of 11 key enablers of VMI relating to supplier capability, supplier-buyer relationship, information technology, top management support, education programmes, continuous improvement, size of hospital among others in public health sector. This study recommends that Kenya and Tanzania should implement VMI since it is possible to create the enablers in public healthcare sector. Theoretically, these findings implies that central medical stores (CMS), as the main government agent of procuring and distributing pharmaceutical products should lead in efforts to adopt and implement VMI in public hospitals.