Ng Teng Fong General Hospital's inventory management system for non-stock items

The Perioperative Services at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital (NTFGH) is a state-of-the-art facility that provides a comprehensive range of services to support patients undergoing surgery such as pre-operative assessment and planning, anaesthesia, operating room care and post-operative care.

Since partnering with Healthcare Services Employees' Union (HSEU) to set up the Company Training Committee (CTC) in August 2019, NTFGH has been actively looking at improving work processes to enhance the well-being of its patients, nurses and the healthcare team. This commitment has led to NTFGH embarking on an Operation and Technology Roadmap (OTR) journey in March 2023, which was specifically aimed at improving people, process and system management within the Perioperative Services team.

 

Project details

 

The OTR session provided a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the clinical and administrative staff in the manual inventory management of the non-stock items. Facilitated by NTUC’s Industry Training & Transformation (IT&T), the team comprising staff from the NTFGH Perioperative Services and representative from ALPS agreed to focus on:

• Developing an effective inventory management systems and new processes for non-stock items
• Upskilling or redesigning current staff roles to meet the new inventory management solution’s requirements
• Enhancing processes to improve inter-departmental communications
• Exploring new ways to reduce wastage

 

The team is currently in the process of applying for the CTC Grant administered by NTUC’s e2i to support the above initiatives which could potentially benefit up to 60 clinical staff.

 

 

Outcome and benefits

 

Ongoing CTC collaboration aims to:

 

• Implement an effective inventory management system that minimises unproductive time for at least 30 clinical staff
  
• Provide wage increase for the affected clinical staff
  
• Upskill clinical staff to perform higher-value jobs, thereby increasing productivity