When people talk about healthcare logistics, they almost always think of the hospital. But every health centre and every local clinic also needs supplies to work each morning, and there supply is usually organised by habit, not by design. It is the supply chain nobody looks at, which is why time and money are lost without anyone seeing it.
Many small sites, little visibility
The problem in primary care is not volume but dispersion. A health area can have dozens of centres and clinics, each with its own cupboard, its own orders and its own way of counting. The store that supplies them rarely knows what is at each site, and each site rarely knows what is at the next one. That lack of visibility produces situations any centre will recognise:
- Orders by habit. People order what they always order, or a little more just in case, rather than what has been consumed.
- Stock that expires in a cupboard. In a small clinic, a rarely used product can go months without anyone looking at it.
- Unexpected shortages. Supplies run out just before a consultation and have to be ordered urgently or borrowed from another centre.
- Nursing time spent counting and ordering. Time not spent with patients and that nobody has measured.
Why it is neglected
There are three reasons. Each centre handles small quantities and it seems not worth organising. The spending is spread across many sites and does not appear in any report. And tools designed for a hospital do not fit a health centre, which has no store of its own and no logistics team.
But the total counts. What is a detail in one centre is, across a whole health area, a considerable volume of purchases, expiries and hours.
What changes the situation
You do not need a heavy solution. Four decisions are enough:
- An agreed supply level for each centre, based on what it really consumes and reviewed regularly.
- Replenishment based on consumption, so that what has been used is what is ordered, not the usual. A simple Kanban system is enough to start.
- Shared visibility between the store and the centres, to know what there is and what moves across the whole area.
- A delivery model designed for primary care, with routes and frequencies adjusted to each site’s consumption rather than the same for all.
The platform gives visibility on its own; its full value comes from integration with the organisation’s systems, with a scope defined in each project.
Start with one zone
Here too there is no need to change the whole area at once. A good starting point is a group of centres that share a store or delivery route. Measure for a few weeks how much material is consumed, how much is lost to expiry and how much time goes on ordering and counting. With those data, the discussion about the supply model rests on facts, not impressions.
Three questions to start
- Does the area store know today what is at each centre, without making a phone call?
- How much material expired unused in clinics over the last year?
- Have delivery routes and frequencies been reviewed since they were defined?
If any answer is “I don’t know”, there is a first piece of work with measurable value.
To see how this approach is organised, read our Hospital logistics solution, which includes the design of the supply model, and Kanban and two-bin. To understand why shortages and surpluses occur at the same time, read our article on stockouts and surpluses in the same hospital.