The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Systems for Improved Access to Pharmaceuticals and Services (SIAPS) program, implemented by Management Sciences for Health, and its predecessor programs have provided technical assistance (TA) support to strengthen public health pharmaceutical management systems in countries around the world for about a decade and a half.
A significant proportion of SIAPS TA support to countries is for strengthening health supply chains for HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) programs. The TA support involves developing and implementing appropriate country or regional strategies and interventions to close gaps and bottlenecks in key supply chain functional areas––quantification, procurement, warehouse (storage) and distribution management, inventory management, logistics management information systems (LMIS), transportation, and waste management. Through this effort, SIAPS has contributed to improvements in supply chain operations, responsiveness, and effectiveness, thus ensuring availability to patients of essential health commodities.
Human resource capacity development is critical to SIAPS mission. SIAPS would like to enhance supply chain staff capability in areas such as framing supply chain strategies, developing, implementing and applying appropriate key performance indicators to monitor effectiveness of tailored TA approaches and interventions for addressing gaps in various supply chain functional areas.
To this end, SIAPS conducted a three-day supply chain management capacity development workshop for its technical staff involved in supply chain efforts.
