Reverse logistics model for vaccine waste in marginal areas

The management of waste and waste from vaccination processes has become relevant because they are an important part of all health systems, even more so after the Covid19 global pandemic. The contamination that these vaccination remains can generate warrants attention in their handling and subsequent destruction. From an operations management approach, waste recovery is a stage of a logistics process made up of various links that establish coordination and organizational integration with varying degrees of operational maturity. (Rosyidah et al., 2022). A reverse logistics model is proposed in health centers geographically distributed in areas far from waste disposal centers. Likewise, a web application will be built that generates the metrics of the proposed models under different complexity configurations of the logistics network.

Logistical response designs in epidemic situations have been applied long before the appearance of Covid19. The appearance of the H1N1 epidemic in 2009 in China, which spread very quickly through more than 214 countries, affecting more than a million people, generated a challenge for the models that had been established as a rapid and focused response when determining the areas with the highest density of infections (Liu et al., 2019) One of the first logistics network designs for waste related to the care of patients due to Covid19 at the beginning of 2020 in China, proposed an integrated model of locations based on the strategy to confront the pandemic, which initially for some countries meant isolating the inhabitants of these areas (Yu et al., 2020), then with more information and given the speed of the spread of infections, models with more flexibility appear that incorporate elements with temporary incinerators that later, with the appearance of the first vaccines at the end of 2020, waste management networks with temporary vaccination centers are designed (Mantzaras & Voudrias, 2017).