4 Ways to Manage Hospital Instruments & Equipment

Hospital inventory management is a difficult task. Tough because it requires the staff and the hospital administrators to do a constant examination of the incoming & outgoing inventory. This is done to check whether the wholesale medical supplies are understocked to meet the demands or overstocked which might increase the financial burden and the storage issue. Medical equipment inventory is tough as a managerial task because it’s composed of supplies like swabs, needles, ointments, syringes, glucose bottles, bandages, etc. and all the management takes a lot of energy and effort for segregation and organisation. If the hospital inventory is effectively managed, the financial burden can be reduced.

The techniques for making hospital inventory management better are as follows:  

1) Medical Inventory Organization & Labelling: Organization and labelling is the most important step towards effective management. Bad organizing is because of the faulty practices like haphazard upkeep, putting things in the wrong places, mismanagement, wrong labelling of items, etc. can affect the hospital’s operations. Organizational practices like designating closets and supply room for each type of product. Wrong labelling is one of the common occurring mistakes and it should be corrected because it provides a false idea of the volume of a certain product in the stock that it actually was. So, implementing a barcode tagging system for products, double-checking labels and so on can help to ease the labelling of the products.

2) Staff Training for Inventory Management: The hospital staff is the the end receiver of the medical supplies & equipment. They are supposed to handle it, organise and label it. They will be the ones who are going to get the medical supplies for doctors from the place where they have kept it. The mismanagement of the inventory is only when the staff is unaware of the practices like getting the stock from the assigned spaces and keeping the unused products back in their places or when they don’t check the expiry dates of the products on the shelf leading to the wrong usage. It’s best to train your staff and make them aware of the terms such as mismanagement or poor management, loss due to mismanagement, handling the inventory and overstock or understock issues, etc.

3) Switch to Advanced Technologies: The advanced technology in any business makes it grow beyond its limitations. So, even hospital inventory management can work wonders if the management knows how to work on the technological front. After employing the new technology at the hospitals, clinics and medical facilities, they have worked quite well in streamlining their operations. There’s a software called Med-E-Nova which provides a solution for all the financial, clinical and operational activities in the hospital or a medical institution.

The better the inventory management, the better is the way to stay away from the medical deadstock. With better organisation and labelling, staff training on inventory management and incorporating advanced technology are definitely going to enhance the overall position of the hospital’s inventory status. It will also help in the reduction of the operational cost with the and efficient inventory management system.