Policy Analysis With Simulation: Centralization of Blood Supply Chain

Abstract

Incessant increase of human population and environmental factors increase patients' need for blood, so research on this topic is a crucial necessity. A blood supply chain starts with the donation of blood and ends with transfusion to patient, and configuring blood supply chains as a whole has become a major requirement. In this research, blood supply chain system centralization and decentralization policies are compared for a specific setting in Turkey. Effects of these policies on performance measures like number of expired blood products in regional blood bank and, in each hospital and total cost of the blood supply chain system are observed using simulation modeling. Results show that under the given conditions the best policy is maintaining a decentralized blood supply policy which leads to a lower blood expiration rate and lower total cost. © Copyright 2017 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.