Assessing the impact of sustainable supply chain practices on healthcare performance

Abstract

Sustainable supply chain management practices (SSCMP) play a crucial role in an organisation’s sustainable performance especially healthcare in fulfilling healthcare delivery. For an organisation to achieve sustainable performance (triple bottom line), identifying the right determinants of sustainability will contribute significantly toward the attainment of that objective. Despite the notoriety of sustainable supply chain management practices due to the COVID-19 pandemic's massive disruptions, determinants for SSCMP remain under-researched. This study seeks to bridge these gaps by integrating the dynamic capability theory perspective to develop a novel structural equation model examining sustainability-oriented leadership (SoL) and supply chain capabilities (SCC) as determinants of sustainability supply chain practices for facilitating sustainable healthcare performance (SHP). The structural equation modeling technique was employed for the data collected from 550 healthcare professionals in Ghana. The results demonstrate that sustainability-oriented leadership and supply chain capabilities drive sustainable supply chain practices which further enable sustainable healthcare performance. Furthermore, SCC and SSCMP without mediation positively influence sustainable economic performance (SEP), environmental sustainable performance (ESP) and sustainable social performance (SSP), however, SoL directly positively influences SEP and SSP but negatively influences ESP. For managers, the relevance of driving sustainability initiatives and adopting impactful supply chain capabilities for value addition and sustainable performance is highlighted. We reveal that the determinants will lead to SSCMP which further leads to the triple bottom line. The study also introduces a new set of determinants for SSCMP which can be further examined in future studies.