Introduction: Medicine inventory management is a key function in hospital administration in Ghana. Medication management processes include purchasing, storing, dispensing, and monitoring the use of medications. These processes enable the hospital management to achieve its aim or objective of improving patient care in various hospitals. Hospital pharmacies across Ghana are experiencing inventory problems resulting in waste and shortages of medicines. The obvious result of this problem is a regressive effect on patient care due to delayed procedures and drug substitutions (Fox and Tyler 2003). While some drug shortages are uncontrollable (e.g. due to a natural disaster), others can be controlled. The inventory, which is the result of the purchasing process, must be well controlled. However, based on the daily activities performed in the hospital pharmacy, the main concerns related to inventory management occur during the purchasing process. It is problematic and time consuming to decide when and how much to order. Improper inventory management can also arise from the inventory manager's experience with procurement (Alverson, 2003). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Although pharmacists in hospitals have expertise in the effectiveness and treatment protocols of medications administered to patients, they are also tasked with managing, ordering, and producing the medications that are ultimately dispensed to patients. Pharmacists serve as gatekeepers for medication distribution by ensuring the accuracy and appropriateness of prescribed medications. Pharmacists must make decisions regarding their inventory levels about how and when to produce or purchase drugs 2 in response to or in anticipation of patient demand. Often these decisions are made by measuring drug usage based on historical data and defining a common inventory level (measured in days of inventory) which makes the process easy to manage but not efficient (Baumer et al. 2004). However, there is additional information available that pharmacists do not currently use to make inventory decisions. The demand for drugs depends on the patient's condition and the doctor's prescribing protocols. The patient's condition provides a prediction of his or her medication needs during the duration of hospitalization. The consumption of a particular drug on a given day is affected by the mix of patients in the hospital requiring this drug and perhaps by more than one unit of the drug. Because drug use changes over time and is not known with certainty, daily demand is dynamic and stochastic. Therefore, patient care may be compromised if the hospital pharmacy department fails to implement adequate inventory management practices so that medications are readily available when needed. This is because there is a direct link between patient care and the efficiency of the various units of the hospital; Gillerman and Browning (2000) found that there is an interrelationship between patient conditions and drug use, which could mean that the unavailability of the drug may result in a worsening of the patient's condition in hospital, translating into an increase of the patient's stay in hospital. There are five hundred and thirty (530) health facilities in the Greater Accra Region, including one hundred and nine (109) hospitals providing a total of four thousand, three hundred and eighteen (4,318) patient beds (CHMI/PPME-GHS, 2007). The hospitals in the region belong to all four.