GHSC-PSM is celebrating World Health Worker Week with stories about our supply chain professionals and their work to help people live happier, healthier lives. Through their technical and logistical support, as well as their dynamic, creative thinking, they work tirelessly to ensure that patients across the world have access to everything from reproductive, maternal, and child health products to testing and medications for managing HIV/AIDS, malaria, COVID-19, and tuberculosis.
When Zambian pharmacist Ngonga Mwansa saw stockouts in family planning and reproductive health supplies impacting her clients, she worked with GHSC-PSM to successfully lobby for improved delivery services through third-party logistics. This enabled more frequent deliveries while reducing overstocks at the district level and providing her community with sufficient quantities of contraceptives, condoms, and other health products to manage and plan their lives.
“We now have specific monthly transport arrangements to distribute all health commodities to ensure commodity security at service delivery points,” Mwansa said.
Since GHSC-PSM began in 2016, it has provided supportive supervision that helps build supply chain management skills for Ministry of Health staff like Mwansa. It has also assisted in strengthening the supply chain for procuring and distributing family planning and reproductive health products worth approximately $4.9 million to more than 3,000 USAID-supported facilities in Zambia. These include implantable, injectable, and oral contraceptives; intrauterine devices; and female and male condoms.
Madame Kolou Guilavogui, a pharmacy dispensing agent in Doffa, Guinea, was always committed to helping the district’s 400,000 malaria patients get the testing and medicines they needed. However, she didn’t have the best technological tools and training to do it. “One day, a team of regional supervisors came and asked for an LMIS report,” she said, referring to a digital logistics management information system (LMIS). “I had never heard of LMIS, so they didn’t find an account of what supplies we had.”
The US President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) is committed to ensuring malaria supplies are available at service delivery points like hospitals. With funding from PMI, GHSC-PSM and Guinea’s Ministry of Health offered Madame Kolou Guilavogui an LMIS supply chain management course so that she could oversee the pharmacy inventory reports. Thanks to her training, she helped leaders at the district hospital and across eight regional centers reduce malaria product stockout rates from 33% in 2018 to 4.6% in 2021.
Pharmacist Solomon Obiri might not be an OB/GYN, but his role as a warehouse manager with Ghana Health Service is critical to delivering babies safely. Through his work at Koforidua regional medical store, he helps GHSC-PSM implement and maintain cold chain systems that store and transport the maternal health medicine oxytocin at the right temperature to ensure it is effective when administered to mothers during or after childbirth. Maintaining the medication’s “integrity,” as Obiri calls it, requires careful planning at every stage of that process. When kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, oxytocin can induce or improve a mother’s contractions and reduce life-threatening bleeding after labor.
Lab technician Anita Shimirimana needs reliable blood testing to help HIV patients lead healthier, more productive lives and reduce transmission in Burundi, a country with approximately 78,000 HIV patients. As a key implementer of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), USAID strives to identify, test, and treat HIV-infected individuals and ensure they are virally suppressed (an indication that antiretroviral treatment is working). Along this continuum enters GHSC-PSM and its support to the global supply chain - from manufacturers making antiretrovirals, drivers delivering medicine to clinics, warehouse workers storing commodities, and nurses taking samples to test for HIV, to lab workers monitoring the effectiveness of treatment.
“We’re analyzing 768 samples per week,” Shimirimana explained. “For our lab needs, we depend on the supply chain, which allows us to run the viral load test machine.”
Credits:
Zambia: Evaristo Chola Burundi: Bobby Neptune