Application of supply chain approach to improving hazard-resilient health services: framework analysis for ASEAN and options of implementation

Infectious diseases such as SARS and COVID-19, like other natural hazards, underline the interconnectedness of the countries. Both manufacturing and services sectors in the economies of Asia have outsourced supplies from different countries in order to gain a competitive advantage through effective value chain management. The motivations for this outsourcing are to achieve technological innovations, reduce end-product prices, and strengthen strategic competitiveness. This paper applies a supply chain approach to develop the concept of a hazard-resilient healthcare system (HRHS) and to explore ways how this might be achieved. After reviewing the current international thinking on HRHS, which has narrowly focused on building national capacities with national capabilities, it argues that a supply chain approach may provide a better, more robust, and in many ways more realistic, approach to enhance the hazard resilience of national healthcare systems. Within such an approach, capabilities of the local actors (local health authorities and healthcare providers) in a pandemic or disaster-prone situation remain important and should be further strengthened, but international support and assistance in times of emergency should also be a key plank of the system. In a changing world with more frequent high-impact pandemics and disasters, such international support need not be one way, but both ways. A system of mutual support may be developed by forming an effective international common pool of capability in responding to the health needs when a major disaster occurs anywhere in a region or globally. Even though serious limitations exist in the current thinking on HRHS, significant progress has been made on the international humanitarian assistance front, especially in the ASEAN region. While developments on this front have not been a part of the purview of the current international thinking on HRHS, it is argued that they may well form an important corner stone in a typical future national HRHS.