Analysis of Public Procurement Planning Practices on Provision of Quality Health Care Services at Nakuru Level V Hospital, Kenya

Over the recent past, quality of health care has been a major concern for various stakeholders in Kenya. A number of programs such as Beyond Zero campaign, investment in Kidney Dialysis machines, Cancer Scanning machines among others have been launched towards quality health care. It is in this light that this study delves into the influence of public procurement planning practices on provision of quality health care services. Procurement planning involves material requirement planning, resource planning and capacity planning which will be linked to health care service quality. The indicators of procurement planning are used to formulate the specific objectives. The theories on which the study was based on include the Resource Based View Theory and Systems Theory. The research used survey design as only one organization was studied. Therefore, the target population was comprised of top, middle and lower level managers which totals to 98 at Nakuru General Hospital. The study adopted stratified random sampling which gave a sample of 79 managers to be included in the study. Questionnaire was used to collect necessary data and the questionnaire was closed ended. The data collected was then processed using SPSS. Inferential statistics was conducted to test the relationship between the variable where Karl Pearson correlation coefficient was used. Further, descriptive statistics was used where mean and standard deviation were used for generalization of respondent’s opinions. The findings of the study are beneficial towards enhancing health care quality at the Nakuru Level V Hospital. Further, it is beneficial to other Hospitals around the Country struggling with offering quality health care services with respect to the role of procurement planning in achieving the same. The results (p = 0.001) indicated that there is a statistically significant relationship between public procurement planning practices and provision of quality health care because P value is less than 0.05. Regarding the influence of public procurement planning and quality health care, the study established that capacity planning had the greatest influence on quality health care (Beta =.372), followed by master production schedule (Beta = .359), then resource planning (Beta=.117) and finally material requirement planning which had a Beta of .132.