Excellence in Leadership Optimising PPE through the COVID-19 response

Hato

Hone St John

Team: Colin Tan, Simon Bate, Chris Laufale, Mike Casey

In New Zealand, the first COVID-19 case was reported on the 28th February 2020, with a state of National Emergency declared on the 25th March 2020. Globally, there were many learnings from how different countries responded to this pandemic. But, in its early stages, one of the consistent issues was the lack of availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect people working in healthcare.

In June 2020, the office of the Auditor-General released its report on the Ministry of Health’s Management of PPE during the early stages of New Zealand’s response to COVID-19. The report makes clear that stocks of PPE held in NZ were inadequate during this initial period. Hato Hone St John (HHSJ) also encountered similar issues noting shortages in PPE exacerbated by high demands in other countries leading to breaks in the supply chain. This meant that protecting our people required an innovative organisation wide solution supported by good change management to imbed change in practice. We needed to understand the supply chain landscape, stock holding and derive a strategy to optimise available PPE supplies. Throughout the COVID-19 response, we demonstrated iterative improvement to processes to improve supply chain efficiency.

The National Crisis Coordination Centre (NCCC) –Logistics Manager enlisted a cross-functional team to support the response. The team was set up to discuss issues, ideas and test solutions to proactively manage necessary PPE equipment for the safety of our people and patients. We also mobilised internal corporate teams affected by the lockdown to set up a distribution chain. Typically, our supply chain is paper-based, which creates disjointed data systems that lead to information silos. This has led to an inability to track and visualise critical stock holdings across the organisation. We improved:

• The collection of PPE stock data,

• Supplemented the analysis with clinical and response data to create meaningful/proactive reporting.

• Attitudes and altered behaviours of corporate and operational staff to actively support, trust clinical PPE standards, demands and logistical requirements.

We applied modern supply chain methods with change management of personnel to create a unified collection and use of data to quickly respond to the ever-changing response environment presented by COVID-19 and understand how behaviour can drive PPE usage. The information gathered and reported also allowed for best practice of PPE to be reinforced where required to our staff to make it safer for all.