Where to locate medical supplies in nursing units: An exploratory study

Abstract

Nursing unit inventory management is often cited as the top irritant that limits nurses’ ability to provide care at bedside. Our research focus is to determine whether the inventory location in the nursing units interferes with the performance of the replenishment system. The literature review suggests that a decentralization of nursing unit storage areas will require additional logistics resources to manage all of these storage points. Our case studies of four Canadian hospitals tend to demonstrate that decentralized locations do not necessarily lead to a decrease in productivity for logistics staff. Furthermore, although our research focuses on the inventory location in nursing units, it is difficult to isolate the impact of this aspect in the context of the entire replenishment system. For example, reorder frequency also has an impact on productivity. Further research could focus on these topics.