Safe Injection Commodity Management

To provide a continuous supply of safety syringes (with re-use prevention and/or needle stick prevention features) and safety boxes for proper disposal, MMIS works with Ministries of Health (MOH) and their procurement agencies to effectively procure, forecast, distribute, and monitor the quality of products. Policy level efforts to add safe injection commodities to national procurement lists and essential medicine kits support sustainability of the supply chain.

Improving the availability of safe injection devices and establishing systems for the safe management of health care waste are critical elements of a supportive environment where good practices can be sustained. MMIS will take advantage of JSI’s role as a global leader in supply management for essential health commodities and will work to mobilize additional donors to address injection device security.

MMIS works with MOHs and with private and NGO sector providers to build capacity in commodity management, and advocates at national and international levels for increased attention to financing for safety syringes and boxes and for a continuous supply of non-injectable medications, avoiding donor dependence and instead “topping-up” national supplies with donated devices to achieve full supply.

MMIS also coordinates procurement and importation activities among the donor-supported programs providing injectable preparations such as contraceptives, vaccines, and TB drugs. Regional workshops improve national capacity in supply management. Ultimately, the MMIS goal is to ensure that all health facilities have sufficient safe injection supplies.

Program Highlights

Safe Injection Commodities Arrive in MMIS Project Countries for Distribution to Project Sites
To support the increased availability of safe injection commodities in curative services, as well as the safe disposal of these commodities, a pooled procurement was organized by JSI and its subcontractor PATH for all countries in order to achieve an economy of scale. To increase this scale even further, JSI’s CDC- and USAID-sponsored countries were included in the same procurement, totaling about 15.4 million new single use disposable syringes with reuse and/or needlestick prevention features as well as over 168,000 safety boxes.

Register Book Consumption Data Informs Forecasting in Mozambique
One of the first steps in the implementation of the project was to evaluate how many syringes and needles were needed in each unit. The problem was how to go about that when health workers were using small scraps of paper to note the injections given each day in the injection room. These papers were often inaccurate and many went into the waste basket. In maternities and emergency services, often no such account was maintained at all. Faced with this dilemma, the MMIS Logistics and Waste Management Advisor designed a way of registering the number of injections, the number of syringes needed, the injectable preparations which are used most frequently, and the patients who receive them (by age and gender) in a register book.