Innovative health supply chain solutions in Tunisia
Setting the stage
WHO/Patrick Lydon
The Minister of Health expresses his support for the collaboration and stresses the importance of integrating supply chains and renewable energy.
Tunisia’s immunization program is considered one of the most successful in the region. Yet, the logistical challenges of introducing new and expensive vaccines are placing significant pressure on the existing supply chain system design. To ensure the program’s continued success as the vaccine landscape changes, the Tunisia Ministry of Health and project Optimize, a collaboration between the World Health Organization and PATH, are demonstrating the benefits of new supply chain solutions.
Our activities in Tunisia are as follows:
- Implementation of a streamlined and integrated supply chain by removing inefficient steps that vaccines go through before reaching their final destination, creating an integrated supply chain system for all vaccines, drugs, and temperature-sensitive products by regrouping them into a single cold storage and delivery chain.
- Demonstration of a “net-zero energy” supply chain by improving energy efficiency and using solar panels to offset energy consumption for the storage and transport of vaccines, drugs, and temperature-sensitive products.
- Implementation of a logistics management information system to support the supply chain concept described above by replacing a paper-based system with a networked information system. This will enable each level of the supply system to have real-time information on vaccine availability, inventory, and vaccine expiry and will allow the tracking of historical vaccine distribution patterns to improve forecasting.