Adoption of practices for organizational effectiveness in healthcare supply chains

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption of practices and investigating of commonalities/intensities between the factors for measuring organizational effectiveness (OE) across healthcare supply chains in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Design/methodology/approach - System theory coupled with the Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer tool was applied to facilitate the linkage between different nodes of the healthcare chain. An exploratory approach was used to explore and measure the importance of various OE factors across various nodes of the healthcare supply chain. Data were collected using a two-stage questionnaire process addressed at personnel in the UAE’s healthcare sector. Findings - The study identified that 62 OE factors in the health are supply chain. Of these, 15 are related to suppliers, 14 to the healthcare process, 12 to employees, 8 to patients and the community, 6 to government directives and 7 to branding. In total, 21 common factors were identified and clustered into groups based on commonalities and intensities. Research limitations/implications - The study identifies the most important factors for healthcare organizations to achieve OE for different dimensions of operations or performance. These factors will provide valuable insights for decision makers in the sector; it will provide valuable insights to healthcare professionals and academia to investigate more on these factors. Originality/value - While there is an increasing research interest in healthcare supply chains, this is the first study to investigate OE across the entire chain while also evaluating the importance of and commonalities in OE-enabling factors.