Posters

The USAID supported AIDSFree project working with the Ministry of Health (MOH) staff have formed eLMIS Provincial peer support whatsApp groups where issues pertaining to the supply chain are shared and/or resolved. The members of the groups include health facility, district and provincial level health commodity managers and users. Discussions on these fora have seen health facilities that are overstocked or adequately stocked share medical commodities with facilities that are understocked, minimizing stock-outs of critical commodities. We shall further demonstrate the critical role of the collaborative participation of the stakeholder community in change management and sustainable capacity building using data visibility and familiar technology tools and platforms.

The counterfeit medicine includes substandard, unregistered and falsified medicine. These are mainly those products which don’t adhere to the required quality standard and deliberately misrepresented by their identity or composition. The purpose of our research is to understand and create the consumer awareness on the counterfeit medicine and marketing strategies to reduce it. The first phase of the project includes review of research paper, journal, newspaper etc. In the research, it could be identified that extend of counterfeit medicine which is spread across the world. The counterfeit medicine caused death about 1.2 billion people die around the world during the year 2017. India and China were the two-major source from where the counterfeit medicine is manufactured. Total turnover of the counterfeit medicine is around $200 billion per annum. UAE happens to one of the major export hub through which counterfeit medicine are exported to European and other Latin American countries. The second phase included the expert interview. Importer of the Counterfeit medicine use the different HS code of the cosmetic or food supplement to import the counterfeit medicine in UAE so that goods will be outside purview of stringent custom checking and testing. Further the research was conducted with a sample survey at prime hospital which included 96 respondent of different age group and ethnicity. The questionnaire was distributed to test the hypothesis on the consumer awareness on counterfeit medicine. The further conclusion from the survey could help the organization or government with suggestions.

Uganda’s population as per 2014 census was 34.6 million people (UBOS, January 2018) with a total Fertility Rate of 6.9%, one of the highest in the region. While progress has been made in the provision of family planning services by government and its partners, the challenge has been with the delivery model which offers no contact tracing and community referral linkages for majority of the rural beneficiaries.

According to a rapid assessment conducted by AFOD Uganda in Feb 2018, the major access and utilization barriers to family planning services was due to; lack of contact tracing; no freedom of choice of preference-of -method; lack of community linkage and referral to services, negative perception and attitudes triggered by cultural beliefs. AFOD Uganda is therefore building a bridge between the formal health systems and communities through use of mobile phones enhanced with performance cash bonuses to improve access and utilization of family planning services. Activities are conducted through use of Village health teams who map households and identify household heads with mobile phones, an assessment of reproductive health needs and family planning preferences is done, counseling, supply of commodities and referrals for specialized family planning based services is offered.

The results of the intervention in just three months (Feb-April 2018) of implementation has been increase in contraceptive uptake by Women in reproductive age (15-49 years) from 285 to 560 in 2 out of 11 sub-counties in Adjumani District. In conclusion, identification of clients’ family planning preferences and choices, linkage and referral to service points is significant in scaling up access and demand for Family Planning services in rural communities, hence reduction of unintended pregnancies, maternal related complications and improved quality of life.

OpenLMIS is an open source, web-based, electronic logistics management information system (LMIS) software purpose-built to manage health commodity supply chains. The OpenLMIS initiative incorporates a community-focused approach to develop open source and customizable LMIS systems specifically designed for low-resource settings. OpenLMIS is currently deployed in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zanzibar where it is used to manage logistics processes at more than 10,000 health facilities across eight geographies in Africa, providing ordering, reporting, and inventory management for a mix of health programs including for Vaccines (EPI) as well as HIV, Malaria, TB, Family Planning, and Essential Medicines. This poster highlights key features in the latest release of the software, including mobile, offline-capable stock management, an all-new analytics, and data warehouse infrastructure, and foundational features to support vaccine supply chains.

Humanitarian response exceeds the capacity of one organization. Humanitarian organizations (HOs) are entering into partnerships with other HOs and with commercial logistics service providers (LSPs) to improve humanitarian response. In the poster, we would like to present results of our research project “Outsourcing of Humanitarian Logistics Activities: Optimal Pricing Policies and Contracts” funded by the Austrian Research Agency (FWF).The poster looks into the framework for outsourcing in humanitarian logistics and insights concerning the drivers of outsourcing for HOs and drivers of engagements of LSPs in humanitarian operations, the humanitarian logistics activities to be outsourced to LSPs, the types of partnerships and contracts that exist between HOs and LSPs and how they change throughout the disaster phases.This project examines the coordination challenges of the UNHRD network and explores member humanitarian organizations’ incentives of joining the network, a coordination mechanism which achieves system optimality, and impacts of members’ decisions about stock rationing. The influence of transportation costs on distribution decisions in long-term relief operations will also be presented, alongside research progress on the role of financial service providers (FSPs) in Cash Transfer Programming.

While the number of humanitarian aid workers in conflict areas should be minimized for human safety concerns, automatic trucks could be used to replace the majority of aid workers in armed conflict regions and provide assistance to victims safely. The automatic control system for regular commercial cars cannot be used for the majority of existing high duty vehicles (trucks and cranes), also the technical efforts had been made in this field could not reach practical or general solutions. By researching the motion trajectory for this type of vehicles, I reached an innovative automatic control system which can be applied for existing trucks, so the results can open the door for implementing such disaster response programs using self-driving trucks.