ORAHS2025
Abstract Submission

153. Investigating the Incorporation of Circular Economy, Resilience, and Sustainability Concepts in Healthcare Supply Chain Modelling: A Narrative Review with Expert Insights

Invited abstract in session MD-1: Home healthcare, stream Sessions.

Monday, 13:30-15:00
Room: NTNU, Realfagbygget R5

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Fatemeh Alidoost
Business School, University of Exeter

Abstract

Healthcare supply chains (HSCs) support resource-intensive and high-throughput operations and play a critical role in addressing supply chain disruptions and uncertainties, all of which impact economic sustainability and resilience. HSCs are also the primary carriers of healthcare products, and thus, another dimension of sustainability is the reduction of waste and CO2 emissions. A regenerative Circular Economy (CE) that aims at preserving products through circulation in a closed-loop system and reducing waste, can potentially promote both sustainability and resilience, although the dynamics of its application in HSCs remain largely unexplored. This study reviews the current literature on HSC, with a focus on the adoption of circular economy, resilience, and sustainability (CERS) principles and approaches in modelling practice. Our research design includes a structured narrative review to identify CERS measures that were part of existing models, as well as a semi-structured interview with a rating exercise to map the identified measures and practices to empirical settings. Our findings highlight the challenges in evaluating the cost-effectiveness of CE practices as well as their social and environmental impact on HSCs. Our study also unravels the interactions among CERS measures, leading to the development of a framework for integrating CERS into HSC modelling practices, emphasising resilience strategies and sustainability aspects.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers