By Tom Polen, chairman, CEO and president of BD

In the extraordinary year of 2020, we saw a myriad of ways in which the health of our communities, environment and businesses are inextricably linked. Climate change stoked record-breaking wildfires and hurricanes, while social justice issues brought people out of their homes where they had been living, working and quarantining to make their voices heard.

We recognize that in our role as a global organization, BD has a responsibility to address society’s biggest challenges head-on, leveraging our growth and influence to drive improvements. With our Purpose —advancing the world of health™— as a guiding light, it points to where that influence is most obvious today: responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with solutions for diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

However, we’re more than a med tech innovator; we’re also an employer of more than 70,000 people around the world, a member of their communities and a community of our own. Our manufacturing facilities produce billions of life-enhancing devices each year, employing thousands in high-quality jobs, and we seek to do it while minimizing our environmental impact, supporting the members of our global team, and standing up for what is right.

In 2015, we launched a broad, integrated approach to sustainability with goals in four key issue areas that reflected our company’s ambitions for 2020. It is an approach that has enabled our associates to rally around our Purpose to develop innovative diagnostic solutions for COVID-19 in record time, increase the availability of products used in sample collection and the treatment of critically ill patients and work with governments around the world to enable delivery of COVID-19 vaccinations. Other healthcare challenges did not disappear with the onset of the pandemic, however; the many innovations we developed and launched in 2020 serve the entire healthcare continuum, from discovery to diagnosis, to the process of care, to the treatment of disease.

Our approach also enabled us to reduce scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions from our operations by 58%, celebrate our differences while challenging each other to continue advancing our own culture of inclusion, and speaking up to address systemic inequities. I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and we are committed to make further progress in the years ahead.

As we reflect on the work we’ve done these last five years, it’s apparent that the BD of today is a very different company than the BD of 2015 when we set our goals, having doubled in size through the integrations of CareFusion and C. R. Bard; and we’ve witnessed transformations in healthcare and social justice in a short period of time. With these acquisitions, we expanded our product and solution offerings – as well as the geographical network in which we now serve. Today, we are leader in many foundational areas in healthcare, with approximately 90% of all U.S. hospital inpatients receiving care using a BD device and approximately 70% of all U.S. acute hospitals have connectivity to a BD data platform.

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Over the course of five years, we have initiated more than 650 projects related to energy, water and waste efficiency saving $25.6 million. We’ve invested $47.5 million in dedicated capital funding for energy, water and waste reduction projects that supported our 2020 sustainability goals. We met our 2020 targets in many areas, including reduced scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 58%, exceeding our target of 50%; reduced ozone-depleting substance emissions by 95%, meeting a target of 95%; and reduced water consumption by 53%, exceeding a target of 40%.

We have long been a pioneer in forging partnerships with leading health agencies and NGOs to address critical health challenges around the world. In 2019, we were named to FORTUNE Magazine’s Change the World List for our work in helping combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR). That year, we partnered with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to launch a Massive Open Online Course, educating participants in the use of diagnostics related to AMR, which has now reached 13,000 people in more than 100 countries and is available in six languages. We have also equipped more than 70 labs in 19 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia with diagnostic equipment and informatics solutions to help aid in the diagnosis of infections and guide physicians to provide appropriate antimicrobial prescribing and use. 

In addition, collaboration with international organizations have helped to develop online education and training tools to strengthen health and laboratory systems. Through our partnership with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), we deployed more than 300 Global Health Fellows to laboratories in six countries, which resulted in participating lab assessment scores increasing by at least 46% and as high as 196%. Over the course of the last four years, more than 4,000 nurses have been trained to reduce infusion-related infections among health care workers in China through our partnership with Project HOPE.

While this year in particular has put a spotlight on the importance of social justice and racial equity, we are – and always have been – committed to fostering an environment that welcomes and empowers an inclusive and diverse workforce. Over the past five years, our company has established and invested in our teams, processes, policies and programs to ensure that inclusion and diversity is embedded into the core of who we are and everything we do. This includes the establishment of a Global Inclusion Council and nine associate resource groups to provide professional development opportunities and lead company-wide conversations about issues important to our associates. We’ve implemented a supplier diversity program to ensure our supply base aligns with the diverse customers, communities and markets that we serve (and seek to serve), and we are a proud member of the AdvaMed Board’s Inclusion and Diversity Committee and subcommittee.

Our 2020 goals created a platform to engage with our stakeholders on many different issues that affect society at large. Those perspectives, and the important dialog we have created, has informed the next phase of our work and will remain an important part of how we shape our strategies going forward.

With the next stage of our sustainability commitment and goals, we will seek to address and further advance how we manage risks and opportunities around our company’s most significant ESG issues over the next decade. The strategy will address climate change through reducing emissions across the supply chain and integrating climate impacts into various parts of our business strategy and decisions, while also addressing the impact of products and resiliency of the supply chain. It will also seek to strengthen the health of BD’s workforce and communities around the world through the lens of well-being and equality for all.

As we embark on the next phase of work to advance the many topics contained within our sustainability strategy, we remain steadfast in our alignment to the BD Purpose — advancing the world of health™.