Developing Hospital Resilient Supply Chain Scenario through Cross-Impact Analysis Method

Background and Objectives

The hospital and its supply chain must be resilient in the critical situations. Developing scenario is an important tool for planning and decision-making process in these situations. Therefore, this study intended to develop possible scenarios for hospital supply chain resilience.

Material and Methods

This research study is applied in terms of purpose and is based the scenario method and the probabilistic trends approach. The participants of the study were 14 experts from two hospitals who were selected through a purposeful sampling method. The data obtained in the first phase of the semi-structured interviews, were coded and analyzed through using MAXQDA Software. In the next phase, the cross impact analysis questionnaire was used to develop the scenario and the analysis of the data was performed through Scenario Wizard software.

Results

The results of combining 35 states for 12 factors affecting hospital resilience which also included all possible future states, showed that 7 scenarios with high adaptation and 467 scenarios with poor adaptation can be considered. Strong scenarios were divided into three groups of scenarios as "optimistic", "intermediate" and "pessimistic" based on similarity and degree of desirability.