Understanding the UK hospital supply chain in an era of patient choice

Author Posting © Westburn Publishers Ltd, 2011. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edit version of an article which has been published in its definitive form in the Journal of Marketing Management, and has been posted by permission of Westburn Publishers Ltd for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Journal of Marketing Management, 27(3-4), 401 - 423, doi:10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084The purpose of this paper is to investigate the UK hospital supply chain in light of recent government policy reform where patients will have, inter alia, greater choice of hospital for elective surgery. Subsequently, the hospital system should become far more competitive with supply chains having to react to these changes as patient demand becomes less predictable. Using a qualitative case study methodology, hospital managers are interviewed on a range of issues. Views on the development of the hospital supply chain in different phases are derived, and are used to develop a map of the current hospital chain. The findings show hospital managers anticipating some significant changes to the hospital supply chain and its workings as Patient Choice expands. The research also maps the various aspects of the hospital supply chain as it moves through different operational phases and highlights underlying challenges and complexities. The hospital supply chain, as discussed and mapped in this research, is original work given there are no examples in the literature that provide holistic representations of hospital activity. At the end, specific recommendations are provided that will be of interest to service to managers, researchers, and policymakers

A branch-and-cut algorithm for a multi-item inventory distribution problem

This paper considers a multi-item inventory distribution problem motivated by a practical case occurring in the logistic operations of an hospital. There, a single warehouse supplies several nursing wards. The goal is to define a weekly distribution plan of medical products that minimizes the visits to wards, while respecting inventory capacities and safety stock levels. A mathematical formulation is introduced and several improvements such as tightening constraints, valid inequalities and an extended reformulation are discussed. In order to deal with real size instances, an hybrid heuristic based on mathematical models is introduced and the improvements are discussed. A branch-and-cut algorithm using all the discussed improvements is proposed. Finally, a computational experimentation is reported to show the relevance of the model improvements and the quality of the heuristic scheme

Logistic operations in a hospital: a multi-item inventory distribution problem with heterogeneous fleet

A multi-item inventory distribution problem motivated by a practical case study occurring in the logistic operations of a hospital is considered. There, a single warehouse supplies several nursing wards. The distribution of medical products is done by two different teams of workers using a heterogeneous fleet, that is, the available vehicles have different capacities and different structures required to be used in specific nursing wards. The goal is to define a weekly distribution plan of medical products ensuring a balanced workload of both working teams and satisfying all the required constraints (inventory capacities, safety stock levels, vehicle capacities, etc.) that minimizes the total number of visits to locations. A mixed integer formulation is presented and several improvements are discussed. This is a NP-hard problem hardly solved to optimality within a reasonable amount of time, and more so for real size instances, with hundreds to few thousand of products. To circumvent this issue, a matheuristic is proposed to solve the problem. Finally, computational tests are reported and discussed.publishe