Factors Influencing Annual Procurement Planning of Medicines and Medical Supplies in Public Health Facilities Kampara District

Abstract

Background: Proper Annual Procurement Planning in supply chain improves health outcomes and value for money. In Uganda APP is a mandatory requirement for procuring health facilities in accordance with the public procurement PPDA Act of 2003. However, many public health facilities do not give proper attention to preparing the annual procurement plans. The purpose of this study is to assess the factors influencing annual procurement planning of Medicines and Medical supplies in public health facilities in Kampala district. Method: A descriptive cross sectional study design was complemented with qualitative method .The qualitative data was gathered through reviewing logistics tools, physical count of the 30%purposively selected stock cards and interview of the staffs was carried out in Health facilities in Kampala District. A stastical package for social science version 20 was used to analyze the quantitative data .A chi-square was used to determine the association between dependent and the independent variables. Results: Looking at the demographics the health workers who responded positively about the availability of the Annual Procurement Plan where from the National Referral hospitals with 56(37.8%) and reasonable number of other health workers from various health facilities also responded positive about the availability of the Annual Procurement Plan. Significant association was observed between knowledge and availability of annual Procurement planning X2 value of 34.7 and p value of 0.0001, management support and Annual Procurement Planning X2 of 9.87 and P value of 0.008. Lack of knowledge in annual procurement planning by the staff and poor management support were identified to be the bottle necks of Annual Procurement Planning of Medicines and Medical supplies. Conclusion: The availability of annual procurement plans in the facilities was promising yet the capacity of health workers, quality of logistics management information systems and management support needs a lot of improvement. This is attributed to lack of trained staffs in annual procurement, poor use of Logistics management information systems and lack of management support for annual procurement planning of medicines and medical supplies.