Managing your eye unit's supplies

In order to deliver eye care, many resources have to be in place at the right time: your patients, your staff, your facilities, your equipment, and your supplies. In this article, we focus on how you can manage your supplies to ensure that your eye service runs smoothly. These supplies, or consumables, include every little thing needed in the course of your daily work: IOLs, medicines, gloves, forms used for patient care, housekeeping supplies, and equipment spares. If any of these items become unavailable, your eye centre will be unable to provide the same high quality of services, and you may even have to turn patients away. The aim of good supplies management is to ensure uninterrupted services. If you want to effectively manage consumables in your eye unit, you will have to monitor the number of each item available (the ‘stock level’). To do this, you must keep an inventory.