Enabler tools
The toolkit for effective outsourcing to pharmacies
The Enabler Tools support the Process Steps to allow for a smoother, quicker transition to successful outsourcing. You can find out more about each of these Enabler Tools in the OSTK.
Policy
The purpose of Policy is to offer guidelines and approaches to policy that create an enabling environment for outsourcing. It is crucial to ensure that Government Policy caters for outsourcing and establishing meaningful public-private partnerships. Policy references and assesses national policy, legislation and regulatory frameworks that relate to public procurement and public-private partnerships in health. It focuses on understanding the local policy and regulatory environment, the guidelines, standards, and regulations for private sector (non-governmental) actors, and how these work in practice, such as influencing (positively or negatively) outsourcing along the supply chain. This assists the user to make effective outsourcing decisions. Stakeholder identification and engagement is another crucial component of Policy. With this tool, the user can align stakeholders to country policy documents, standards, guidelines, and regulations. Country policy practices that can be referenced as good practices in support of outsourcing are also identified. This tool further covers engaging the private sector to communicate policy documents for optimised public-private partnerships.
Advocacy and Governance
The advocacy process is the start of the outsourcing journey, along with examining policy. Advocacy and Governance aim to develop buy-in to and support the outsourcing process from a range of key stakeholders. This can be done by developing an Advocacy Process which includes:
- The establishment of commitment from stakeholders early in the outsourcing process.
- The set-up of project management and organisation structures such as steering committees and technical working groups.
- Methods of engagement, platforms for communication, and reporting and evaluation tools throughout the outsourcing process.
Advocacy and Governance require developing a thorough understanding of the roles performed and benefits brought by each stakeholder to the project.
- This can be accomplished by drawing up and analysing a list of relevant stakeholders from both public and private sectors and identifying which stakeholders to engage based on known benefits and roles.
People
The purpose of People is to understand the core competencies required by staff in the different stakeholders and whether expertise from outside the organisation should be leveraged to provide capacity building services.
People further assists the management of organisational change once an outsourcing decision is made.
People requires insight into what are considered core or non-core activities and the role of the participating stakeholders.
When defining scopes of work for the different stakeholders, People will identify required skills, capabilities, and capacities.
Technology
- The purpose of Technology is to determine and design the required systems and technologies that can be used to gather, process and report information regarding the outsourced process
- Technology requires a sound understanding of current reporting processes, data flows, and performance level of management information systems to support outsourced distribution through pharmacies.
- Systems and technology for managing outsourced distribution to pharmacies should include the following: • Systems for tracking and monitoring patients • Data management, reporting and dissemination • Geographic information system to locate and register participating retail pharmacies • Dashboards for monitoring progress • Offline capability to ensure data capture is possible where internet connection is unavailable