6.1  What are the supplies at your Health Post?

At each Health Post and health centre there are stores of essential equipment, drugs and other supplies that you will need to use during your routine healthcare work. It would make your work very difficult if one day the things you needed were not available, so it is important to plan and manage these stores as accurately as possible. You have already learned a lot about planning, implementing and monitoring your healthcare activities (Study Sessions 3 and 4). Here we focus on a specific aspect of this process: the management of your Health Post supplies.

The standard Health Post kit containing essential equipment and other supplies was developed by the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) in 2005. These kits are of two types: Health Post Kit A and Health Post Kit B. The only difference between Kits A and B is that Health Post Kit A has a refrigerator, while Health Post Kit B has a cold box instead of a refrigerator.

There are two main types of supplies in your Health Post, referred to as non-consumables and consumables. We will look at each of these in turn.