There are many different types of medical machinery, equipment, and supplies that clinicians rely on to provide patient care. Having timely access to such products can be the difference between a patient making a full recovery or spending excess time in rehabilitation.
As a healthcare manager, your role is to ensure that clinicians have everything they need right at their fingertips. As such, you are indirectly responsible for patient wellbeing. Not only do clinicians need to have access to the right equipment and devices, these products need to be of a high quality and unlikely to put patients at any added risk of developing an injury or infection.
This latter point is very important, particular when talking about single use medical consumables. As the name suggests, these products tend to only be used once before being disposed of. The term can also refer to supplies or equipment that must be fully disinfected and sterilised before being used on another patient.
Managing the stock levels of these products can prove to be quite difficult, particularly should you be faced with an unexpected set of circumstances, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. We all remember urgent conversations and reports about the availability of masks, personal protective equipment, and sanitiser in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.
Managing single use medical consumables may take some time, but before too long, you’ll be confident in your ability to order quality products and maintain appropriate stock levels.
What is a medical consumable?
A medical consumable is a product used by a clinician (a nurse, doctor, or laboratory worker) on a daily basis. They tend to be relatively inexpensive, can be bought in bulk quantities, and are usually single use disposable products.
Medical consumables can operate as stand-alone products, like disinfectants. Or, they might play an essential role as part of a more complex type of equipment. Ultrasound machines, for example, require probe covers to ensure that there is no risk of cross-contamination between patients.
Procedural kits are special packs containing a number of different consumables to be used in a single situation. Surgeons often rely on these kits as they make it incredibly easy to guarantee that everything that is needed for a particular operation is close at hand. These kits can be custom built and often include instruments like scalpels, clamps, needles, gauze, and dressings.
Advantages and disadvantages of single use products
Medical consumables tend to be single use products, which means they are disposed of after use. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this.
To start with, disposing of a product after use means there is no risk of cross contamination between patients. Given the risk that infection poses during even the most simple of procedures, this is certainly a positive.
On the flip side, one-time use products — whether used in the medical industry or any other sector — tend to be very harmful to the environment. If we come to rely too heavily on these products, we will be contributing to landfill (often medical consumables cannot be recycled) and increased greenhouse gases.
The challenge therefore lies in protecting patient health and wellbeing whilst also ensuring we are making intelligent decisions that will protect the earth. Much research and development is currently being carried out to create devices that find the balance between these two concerns.
Tips for managing inventory
It’s not always easy to predict how much stock of a particular product or consumable you might need. If you run an established practice, where you understand the patient base and the types of concerns you are typically treating, the job is made a little easier.
However, if you’re working in a facility that has only just recently opened or are faced with an unprecedented health crisis — like the Covid-19 pandemic — making an informed guess about required stock levels can be difficult.
Fortunately, there are a few strategies you can implement to make things a little more simple.
To start with, you should certainly be digitising your stock levels. Doing so will ensure that inventory is highly accurate and you won’t need to waste time counting by hand.
Secondly, consider (where possible) purchasing procedural kits. Being able to count ‘one kit’ that contains a number of different consumables is far easier from a stocktake perspective than having to keep track of each individual product.
Finally, talk to an experienced and professional supplier of medical consumables. They will understand the types of products you need and can provide tailored advice about required stock and re-ordering timeframes.
