INSIGHT - medIcal oxygen supply chaiN deSIGn and planning for COVID-19 HospiTals

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With the evolution of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic becoming increasingly uncertain andoxygen-therapy being the current dominant treatment of patients, securing resilient and robustoperation of medical oxygen supply chains becomes increasingly urgent. INSIGHT will develop a whole-systems analysis on the integrated design and operation of medical oxygen supply chains inthe UK for current, future waves of SARS-CoV-2 as well as for other pandemics and cases thatrequire emergency planning. A key uniqueness of INSIGHT is the spatially-explicit and uncertainty-awaremodelling of supply chains which will provide a roadmap to region-specific strategies forcoping with different realisations of future COVID-19 waves. Our optimisation-based framework for enhanced decision making for emergency planning will be open-source, publicly available anddue to the design of INSIGHT could be easily generalised to inform European and low and middle incomecountries (LMICs) strategies. To this end, we propose to combine methodologies fromsupply chain optimisation, multi-scale modelling and stochastic optimisation. Throughour long-standing collaboration with Linde.plc we have been developing models related to the airseparation industry. Finally, we have secured the active participation of BOC, one of the two NHSbulk medical oxygen providers, so as to maximise the impact and applicability of INSIGHT'soutcomes.