New Interview - When Supplies Run Out, Patients Pay the Price

Why a vulnerable supply chain may be Canada’s hidden health-care crisis

Published by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

When Dr. Anne Snowdon talks about gaps in our health-care system, she doesn’t sound like a typical business school professor. She sounds like a nurse who’s seen too many preventable tragedies.

“I still remember the three-year-old I looked after in the ICU. You don’t forget that,” she says. “That’s what drives you to fix what’s broken.”

Snowdon eventually took that passion from the bedside to the boardroom.

“I once marched into Chrysler’s engineering department and said, ‘When are you going to stop killing kids and start protecting them better in vehicles?’ They should have thrown me out. Instead, they funded me,” she laughs.

That confrontation led to the development of a safer booster seat for children. It also cemented Snowdon’s belief that innovation can save lives.

Forty years after that first nursing job, Snowdon is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of Windsor’s Odette School of Business; scientific director and CEO of the Supply Chain Advancement Network in Health (SCAN Health); and former academic chair of the World Health Innovation Network.

Her mission today? To help Canada build a resilient, transparent, digitally connected health supply chain.

The supply chain nobody sees—until it breaks

“If we go back to 2003 when SARS hit, we were scrambling. We had no inventory strategy and no supply chain strategy. We begged for and borrowed whatever mask we could find,” Snowdon explains. “And then we did it all over again with COVID, except on a much bigger scale. Years later, nothing has changed. We’re just as vulnerable as ever.”

Snowdon says Canada experiences more—and longer—health product shortages than any country in the world. With less than two percent of global market share, Canada is not prioritized when large economies tighten supply. Geography adds another challenge: products have to travel across one of the world’s largest land masses, including to remote communities.

That results in roughly 3,000 shortages a year—eight to 10 every day—in health-care products.

The deeper issue, Snowdon stresses, is that no one sees the shortages coming. With health care split across federal, provincial and territorial systems, there is no shared place to track products.

Anne Snowdon

“There was a shortage of vincristine, a frontline chemotherapy drug for children with leukaemia,” she explains. “Oncology had no idea that it was in short supply until the pharmacy said, ‘Sorry, I don’t have any.’ For three months, oncology teams had to decide which kids got the drug and which didn’t. That’s heartbreaking.”

When trade wars meet hospital wards

Snowdon says the global political climate makes Canada even more vulnerable.

“We’re in a trade war,” she says. “When there’s a trade war, a natural disaster or a pandemic, big countries like the US and China get priority. We’re at the back of the line.”

For example, her team ran a simulation on what would happen if China invaded Taiwan. The answer was chilling.

“Sixty percent of our pharmaceuticals depend on those two countries—either for raw ingredients in China or for microchips in Taiwan. If that supply stops, our system collapses,” says Snowdon.

“No country can be self-reliant in health care, but we can be smarter,” she says. “We can build digital systems that tell us what we have, where it is, and which patients are at risk. Right now, that data doesn’t exist.”

A “Team Canada” approach to health supply

SCAN Health, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, is working with partners to design solutions to Canada’s supply chain challenges. The hope is these solutions will help connect every Canadian hospital and health system and enable them to track stockpiles, vulnerabilities, product use and patient outcomes.

Through another SSHRC Partnership Grant, Snowdon created a community of practice (CoP). The pan-Canadian collaboration brings together federal agencies, provincial governments, hospitals and manufacturers.

“SSHRC is the only funding agency that creates the conditions for this kind of partnership,” she says. “No single discipline can solve health supply chain problems. You need business schools, health systems, engineers, policy-makers—everyone at the table.”

The CoP has already produced solutions. One team built an artificial intelligence tool that identifies Canadian manufacturers of essential health products.

“You can search ‘blood tubes’ and see if a Canadian company makes them here at home. Supply teams were shocked—they didn’t know these companies existed,” says Snowdon.

Another team developed a risk assessment tool to help hospitals prioritize care during shortages.

“It helps supply teams understand not just inventory risk, but patient risk,” Snowdon says.

Digital backbone, safer patients

Digitizing supply chains, she says, will save both lives and money.

“Once you digitize, your costs per patient drop about 30%,” she explains. “You stop wasting supplies that expire on the shelf. You buy what you know you will use. More importantly, you know which products deliver the best outcomes for which patients.”

Some countries are further ahead in managing health supply chains.

“Germany mandated hospitals to advance their digital infrastructure, which is required to report patient outcomes,” says Snowdon. “In 18 months, they went from zero digital maturity to level three or four. Level seven is the goal. It’s doable—and it’s transformative.”

Other sectors show what’s possible.

“Retail can track a pair of jeans anywhere in the world. Pharmacies track what drugs they have, what they need and when they’ll arrive. Aviation knows what passengers got on what flights and sat in what seats,” she explains. “If that system were introduced in health care, it would be a complete game changer.”

Why it matters

For Snowdon, this work is personal. Her father died from a reaction to a commonly prescribed heart medication.

“To this day, we don’t track those outcomes. We don’t know which drugs are harming which patients. That’s unacceptable,” she says.

The nurse in Snowdon also remains. She wonders about those young cancer patients and the impact the delayed chemotherapy treatments had on them. Supply chain, to Snowdon, isn’t about logistics—it’s the invisible lifeline that keeps patients alive.

“I am relentless because at the end of every supply chain is a person’s life,” she says. “That’s why I do what I do.”

Want to learn more?

Check out Anne Snowdon’s latest SCAN Health podcast, Operating Blind: How Health Supply Chain Impacts Patient Care.