| Abstract: | Within immunization programs supported by the World Health Organization, current practice is to use a vial as the basic unit for managing vaccine inventories at the clinic level. In addition to being inconvenient, this has the potential to induce errors in the ordering process. We propose alternative ordering policies based on using inner pack quantities corresponding to secondary vaccine packaging and draw upon visual management, simplified inventory tracking, better housekeeping, and other lean related concepts that have been used in the manufacturing sector to simplify and improve the vaccine inventory management system. We present analyses that show that the proposed polices only require very modest increases in fixed storage and transport requirements. |
