Evaluation of inventory management practices in Mulago Referral Hospital

Abstract

One of the major challenges facing Ugandan hospitals especially government aided hospitals is Having effective inventory management practices in place and this has been linked to factors Like difficulty in predicting the patient mix and ultimately their supply and consumption; this is to say you can’t ascertain the type of patient who will come to the hospital at any given time. Mulago referral hospital has not been spared when it comes to these challenges, therefore an in depth study about its inventory management practices has been done and in this case the independent variable is inventory management practices.

The objectives of the study were: to identify inventory management practices in Mulago Referral Hospital, their effectiveness , challenges and feasible strategies that can be implemented to address the challenges . A cross section of sampled population of Mulago Referral Hospital staff was relied on to get responses on the set objectives. The method of data collection was by use of questionnaires and document study. 73 respondents participated in the study though the issued questionnaires were 80 therefore the response rate was 91.3% which was vital for results.

Major conclusions arrived at from the study findings were that: Mulago hospital just like other organizations has various inventory management practices. The ones that stood out, during the study included stock taking at the end of every quarter of the year to determine stock available . The segregation of Inventories sundries and drugs kept seperately was also interesting in the practice and segregation of expired drugs and labelling them to avoid issuing them was also major, coupled with verification of inventory in the hospital store done by a team and top management supervises store every after one week.