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Healthcare products comprise medications, vaccines, devices, and surgical and medical procedures used in disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation.
These are key pillars of Kenya’s road towards Universal Health Coverage. Effective management of health products through good inventories, resilient supply chain systems, rational use, harmonised regulations, and sound policies is critical to ensuring the optimal functioning of healthcare systems.
The Guidelines on Management of Health Products and Technologies in Kenya (2020), which are anchored on the Health Products and Technologies Supply Chain Strategy 2020-2025, provide the framework of information, procedures, and the tools needed to ensure regular and reliable supply of HPTs, their appropriate storage, control, and issuing across the various levels of service delivery.
Despite the guidelines and policies, access to health products and technologies remains a persistent problem in Kenya.
Under devolution, counties continue to grapple with institutional hurdles such as poor financing, inadequate inventory systems, disconnected supply chain management, inadequate human resources, and underused health information systems.
These institutional hurdles manifest themselves in public health facilities. Cash-strapped budgets, poor forecasting, and inadequate restocking translate to regular stock-outs of essential health products, leading to exclusion of a significant ratio of the population from reliable access to essential medicines and an increase in out-of-pocket spend on medical bills.
For health systems to function properly, efficient supply chains are vital to ensure equitable access to affordable, high-quality health products. The National Treasury issued a directive that all counties were to migrate to the Electronic Government Procurement(e-GP) platform by July 1 2025.
The system is envisioned to enhance the transparency, efficiency, and accountability of the public procurement process. However, less than 45 percent of the counties have fully integrated this platform into their process, which signals a gap in policy and implementation adoption. As such, most counties still use hybrid or manual procurement procedures.