By David Shan, EVP & Chief Quality Officer

November 8 marks the start of World Quality Week, celebrating the quality management profession and supporting the Chartered Quality Institute’s (CQI) mission to champion quality management for the benefit of society. This year CQI goes one step further, drawing attention to quality's role in sustainability and its environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact for 2021, as “sustainability can’t just be an area that you and your organization consider. You need to commit to building it into your company culture because it’s here to stay.”

Our Quality Journey
For BD, quality has always been at the core of providing safe, effective products and services to our customers and patients to advance global health. Quality remains a journey of continuous improvement upon which we are relentlessly evolving our processes, systems and policies to meet the ever changing global regulatory and safety requirements. A vital component of our BD 2025 strategy, Inspire Quality is a multi-year plan to invest in quality by implementing three important goals: grow our customer relationships through trust, transparency and reliability; simplify our processes to make it easier to do business with us; and empower associate and customer decision making, harnessing data-driven insights for proactive partnerships. Over the next years, BD will execute this multi-year journey to enhance our end-to-end quality systems, allowing our company to work more efficiently and ensure our high standards of quality.

Today’s Healthcare Environment
What factors led BD to develop our Inspire Quality plan? Over the past 125 years, particularly in recent years, BD has grown with an expanded portfolio of products and services. Along with that growth, the global healthcare industry has continued to evolve with increasingly complex requirements designed to keep patients safe and businesses like BD compliant to these important safety and efficacy standards. In whole, these complexities have changed the healthcare landscape, the way BD operates across multiple global quality management systems, and the customers we serve.  The need to simplify and streamline our approach to these intricacies led BD to create our Inspire Quality plan, to position BD as a best-in-class, quality-driven organization that decreases risk, simplifies processes and ensures compliance.

A Healthy Dose of Sustainability & Transparency
BD is fortunate to have a wealth of human experience and healthcare expertise within our organization. We want to make the most of that knowledge by empowering our associates to prioritize our quality culture aligned to The BD WAY. We firmly believe that our core value of, “We thrive on innovation and demand quality.” serves as a North Star for our associates to deliver high-quality BD products. World Quality Week is our opportunity to consciously recommit ourselves to that promise. We provide our teams with the support and tools they need to do their best work, allowing the team to make quality-driven decisions that ultimately reduce risk and deliver what’s next for the future of healthcare.

Through Inspire Quality and our collaboration with our Environmental, Sustainability and Governance partners, we are working to strengthen our company’s foundation through good quality management governance and enhanced transparency in reporting, which can already be seen in our company’s 2020 Sustainability Report as we move closer towards the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Medical Equipment and Suppliers Sustainability Accounting Standard disclosures. Often, making quality-driven decisions results in quality field actions, recalls or global product holds which can create challenges for our customers and the patients they serve. It is our conviction in protecting our customers’ and patients’ safety, based on available data, and medical and regulatory input, that drives BD associates to make these tough choices and to communicate these decisions as transparently as possible with stakeholders.

In 2021, as we continue to face the world’s greatest healthcare challenge yet, we are immensely proud of the advancements we made toward a more sustainable and transparent future, which ultimately contribute to our core mission of advancing the world of health. Our 2030 sustainability strategy is just as tenacious, now focused on five impact areas — transparency, responsible supply chain, climate change, product impact and healthy workforce and communities — that address a range of industry challenges while helping to make a difference on relevant issues that affect society and the planet. These new areas of focus will drive us into the next decade with quality as that underlying foundation of customer and patient trust.​ 

Strengthening BD’s Foundation
As BD enters into World Quality Week, we take pride in knowing our organization invests in end-to-end quality management solutions, ensuring our products and services are safe, reliable and effective for customers and patients. Quality is the true foundation of patient and customer trust; by creating and executing our Inspire Quality plan, we are confident we will expand our customer relationships with an enhanced patient experience, continue to meet global regulatory requirements while fulfilling the needs of our business, and invest more in innovation, creating quality-by-design. That is how BD inspires quality.