Abstract:

Introduction: Inventory management involves all activities in a warehouse or store put in place to ensure that customer have the needed product or service. Inventory management is primarily involved with specifying the size and placement of stocked goods. It coordinates the purchasing, manufacturing and distribution functions to meet the marketing needs and organisational needs of availing the product to the customers. Essential Medicines mean medicines that satisfy the needs of majority of the population and therefore should be available at all times, in adequate amounts, in appropriate dosage forms and at a price the individual and community can afford.

A large number of Hospitals and Pharmaceutical organisation’s services collapse because of poor practices of inventory management and techniques which slow down their operations. When proper inventory management is practiced and the technique efficiently, the stock out and other negative consequences of poor inventory practices can be stopped. In hospitals inventory control ensures the availability of medicines and other pharmaceutical products on time but also to ensure best customer service which in return standardise the performance of the hospitals in general.

Methodology: A cross-section study was conducted to collect data through a semi-structured questionnaire with closed-ended and partially open-ended questions. A questionnaire was to determine logistics skill levels of personnel, inventory management practices and to assess the availability of tracer medicines that are selected from a list of essential medicines according to the Tanzania country list.


Results: Both manual and computer systems were used by most of public health facilities in inventory management, using only one method (Consumption) for quantification. The stock out was the most common inventory management problem which attributed with delaying on placing orders, also medicines received near expiry and those medicines which had more than one brand name cause an expiry of medicines in public health facilities.

Overstocking of medicines in public health facilities was caused by both over estimated and misjudged patients demand, the storage conditions was on good status in most of the had about health facilities on the study area.

Conclusion: Majority of the essential medicines availability are not associated with the inventory management systems, unlike to Ampicillin, Benzoic acid compound (Whitfield), Erythromycin, Magnesium trisilicate Tablet and Sulphamethoxazole + Trimethoprim are associated with inventory management systems.