Hospital logistics at the service of caregivers and patients

Everyone thinks of the famous e-commerce giants, whose business model and success would be nothing without their formidable logistics, enabling customers to receive a product in a matter of hours at the click of a button, without having to leave their homes. Walking along the roads of France, we can also see warehouses taking over our territories, trucks, planes, trains or boats transporting goods from the four corners of the globe. The images associated with this function are often limited to the contexts of industry and distribution, storage and transport. When we think of the hospital, we think first and foremost of care, rarely of the logistics that may be associated with it. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has made us realize that, without logistics, hospitals - and the healthcare system in general - cannot provide care. Shortages of masks or hydro-alcoholic gel, stock-outs or severe pressure on essential medicines were all risks that weighed heavily on the management of the health crisis.

Logistics is often defined as the technology of controlling physical flows by means of information flows, enabling the right product to be positioned at the right time, in the right place and at the right cost. However, logistics is more than just the implementation of a technology; it invites us to rethink organizations in a more cross-functional way, both within and between organizations. We therefore define logistics management as "that component of Supply Chain Management which effectively and efficiently plans, implements and controls the outward and return flows of goods, their storage and services, using associated information, in order to satisfy customer requirements" (CSCMP, Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, 2007).

When applied to the hospital context, logistics actually encompasses a wide range of activities, sometimes far removed from this definition, and closer to industrial activities internalized within organizations, such as laundry, catering or garden maintenance. Without denying the existing links between these activities and the role of a hospital, this article chooses to confine the scope of analysis of hospital logistics to the management of physical flows as envisaged in an industrial context. It also highlights the specific nature of hospital logistics in terms of the presence of patients and the very nature of the services they receive. Indeed, hospital logistics, and all the men and women who make it up, are at the service of the care activity. They must therefore understand the many subtleties involved, whether philosophical (intimacy, free will, caregivers' commitment), technical (we all remember the different types of masks used during the Covid-19 crisis, or the different syringes used during vaccination campaigns) or organizational and...