Forecasting for seasonal products
Some consumables and reagents used in the lab are required seasonally because some diseases happen as seasonal epidemics. For example, meningitis in the meningitis belt zone in the Sahara regions of Africa. How do you forecast for such commodities in order not to be taken by surprise and also to avoid expiries?
Comments
Its simple, set a fix time to do it, especially the season that precedes the potential outbreak
In my openion ,there is Servillance & early warning section in Public Health emergency management . Its role is gathering different information that use to predict the occurrence of such epidemic and inform the leadership to prepare accordingly . If such system is not functional next step is cost benefit analysis (risk analysis ) between 'losing life' due to lack of supply for detection of cases and expire of supply due to not happening the outbreak .
For some of these seasonal epidemic conditions when we perform surveillance system evaluation and surveillance data analysis it will help with trends. This will be useful in our forecasting when we are prepositioning logistics for the next epidemic season as part of our epidemic preparedness and response plan