Building for the Future: Review, Recovery, and Refocusing
Governance – Partnerships – Innovation – Financing – Workforce – Equity
The 14th Annual Global Health Supply Chain Summit (GHSCS-2021) focused on Building for the Future: Review, Recovery, and Refocusing. When we hosted GHSCS2020, we had hoped for our next conference that much of the world would have begun a return to normality and we could meet in person. Alas, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe. While several countries are beginning to recover, many are still at early phases of their vaccination campaigns and equitable access to vaccines remains a challenge. Global Health Supply Chains have been under tremendous stress to address the burden of COVID-19 while continuing to meet routine healthcare delivery needs. More than a year into the pandemic, we feel it is important to take stock of how supply chains have managed to cope with such stress; and discuss strategies that have been developed to address the gaps and vulnerabilities on their journey to recovery, including partnerships, innovations, financing, workforce, and governance models to ensure equitable access to healthcare for all. We would also like to highlight approaches to refocus global health supply chains for the future. Importantly, as we build back our supply chains, we need to ensure that we take a holistic and systems-based approach towards strengthening supply chains for end-to-end service delivery supporting diagnostics, essential medicines, and health care products to address current health issues as well as the growing burden of non-communicable diseases.
GHSCS 2021 explored these issues through a combination of keynotes, panel discussions, poster exhibits and contributed talks. As in the past, the conference has assembled a collection of experts that include Government representatives, academics, NGOs, civil society, industry, donor and multilateral representatives to explore these topics. The committee was particularly interested in capturing the voices from the field to learn and share experiences related to managing supply chains during the pandemic and also ideas to prepare for the future.
The conference schedule included:
Keynotes, panel discussions, cultivated talks, virtual poster exhibits and prize presentations.
Announcement of the 14th Global Health Supply Chain prize and the Global Health Supply Chain RESEARCH CHALLENGE (co-sponsored with Chemonics), was made during the Closing Session.
Access full 2021 program (pdf) here
Access recordings of sessions here
2021 Prize Competition Summary here
GHSCS-2021 sincerely appreciates sponsorship from the following:
