Abstract:
Pharmaceutical stock-outs are major challenge facing public healthcare sector in Kenya and
Tanzania. Many preventable deaths especially in rural communities have been witnessed due to
lack of essential medicines for high-risk diseases such as Malaria in public healthcare facilities.
The stock-outs of medicines continues to occur even as central medical stores in East African
countries at the end of each financial year report billions of financial losses resulting from
expired drugs at their central warehouses. An effective inventory replenishment strategy such
as Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) by central medical stores applied at each public
healthcare facility is capable of preventing pharmaceutical stock-outs in government hospitals.
This paper, basing on Principal Agent Theory conducted a systematic review of VMI enablers in
public healthcare sector. The study was driven by the motivation to recommend a solution that
can increase the continuous availability of drugs in public health facilities in East African
countries. To this end, the study used a group of six key words to search through Science Direct,
PubMed bibliographic databases, and Google scholar search engine for peer reviewed articles
on VMI implementation in public healthcare sector. The results found by keywords were
reviewed, non-relevant articles excluded, and eight articles were selected, analysed, leading to
finding of 11 key enablers of VMI relating to supplier capability, supplier-buyer relationship,
information technology, top management support, education programmes, continuous
improvement, size of hospital among others in public health sector. This study recommends
that Kenya and Tanzania should implement VMI since it is possible to create the enablers in
public healthcare sector. Theoretically, these findings implies that central medical stores (CMS),
as the main government agent of procuring and distributing pharmaceutical products should
lead in efforts to adopt and implement VMI in public hospitals.
