Blood products, intravenous saline, and medical oxygen are foundational to modern health care delivery. Despite their essential role, recent public health emergencies, natural disasters, supply chain disruptions, and market shocks have exposed significant vulnerabilities in the systems that produce, distribute, and sustain access to these critical resources. While individual shortages, such as blood supply declines, saline manufacturing interruptions, or oxygen access crises, have been examined in isolation, they are rarely addressed as part of a broader resilience challenge affecting critical medical resources.

The purpose of this webinar series is to scope and understand the vulnerabilities, dependencies, and systemic challenges that affect the continuity of blood, saline, and medical oxygen supplies. The series is intended to support sense-making across sectors by clarifying how these systems function today, where they are fragile, and how challenges are currently understood by different actors. The series will provide a forum for candid, cross-sector dialogue to surface experiences, perspectives, and lessons learned, and to help inform future National Academies activities related to medical and public health preparedness. The series is not intended to produce formal recommendations, but rather to clarify challenges, elevate key insights, and identify questions or areas where further analysis, coordination, or innovation may be warranted. By the end of the series, participants will aim to:

• Examine domestic and global supply chains for blood, saline, and medical oxygen, and identify key fragilities including manufacturing concentration, logistics, workforce, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Surface concrete use cases that illustrate key gaps and challenges, as well as adaptive strategies and promising solutions across sectors.
• Explore policy, regulatory, and market/ transportation dynamics that shape incentives, resilience, and investment in critical medical resource systems.
• Propose models and strategies that support sustainable and resilient systems, including redundancy, diversification, public–private coordination, and regional or national approaches.
• Surface cross-cutting insights and questions to inform future research, convenings, and preparedness efforts.