Our purpose
Helping all people live healthy lives
To Our Stakeholders:
When BD was founded at the turn of the 20th century, the company was a startup creating the building blocks of modern medicine — needles and syringes to deliver medications and vaccinations, blood collection devices to support accurate diagnosis, and many other technologies for delivery of healthcare. 118 years later, having just completed our $12 billion acquisition of CareFusion, the company has stronger capabilities and a renewed spirit of innovation to address some of the world’s most pressing health challenges.
I’ve seen how our customers around the world try and balance demanding and often competing needs: increasing access to healthcare; improving clinical outcomes and efficiency; lowering costs of operations and ownership; and optimizing patient and employee safety. I believe BD has an essential role to play in driving these goals, together in partnership with our customers, governments and other key stakeholders. And I see unique opportunities to support emerging markets in addressing these goals in earlier stages of development — potentially “leapfrogging” more established health systems where adoption of new technologies can be slow.
We are building on the company’s longstanding commitment to patient and healthcare worker safety to advance new technologies for reducing medication errors — a challenge that impacts millions of patients worldwide.
In recent years — particularly given our completed merger with CareFusion — we’ve been transforming BD to accelerate our ability to help in creating more sustainable healthcare systems. We are building on the company’s longstanding commitment to patient and healthcare worker safety to advance new technologies for reducing medication errors — a challenge that impacts millions of patients worldwide. Our smart devices integrate with electronic medical records, workflow and prescribing systems to ensure that each patient receives the right drug with the right dose through the correct route of administration, at the right time. We are also committed to driving reductions in healthcare-associated infections and to tackling the rise of antibacterial resistance. BD’s strength in diagnostic technologies, coupled with CareFusion’s capabilities in infection prevention and health informatics, will make it possible for health systems to employ an end-to-end solution that keeps pace with a bacterial ecosystem that is quite literally evolving.
These technologies reflect just some of the new and enhanced opportunities that our merger brings for us to deliver on our purpose of “Helping all people live healthy lives”. And we recognize that with greater capabilities comes increased responsibility.
Sustainability Goals
Rising to this challenge, we have updated our sustainability strategy and goals for 2020, and established key performance indicators to manage progress and ensure accountability. The new goals reflect a broader and more integrated sustainability agenda than past years, recognizing four key issue areas where the company has traditionally engaged and where we will redouble our efforts going forward.
 | INNOVATIONHealthcare safety, reach & cost |
 | ACCESSHealthcare in resource-limited populations |
 | EFFICIENCYEnvironmentally sound products & resilient operations |
 | EMPOWERMENTPositive workforce & community impacts |
In total, our work over the last five years significantly improved BD’s environmental performance, while also delivering more than $25 million in cost savings.
Reflecting on performance against our 2015 goals, I’m pleased to announce that we have exceeded four of our five targets. Where we fell short, in achieving our energy reduction goal, we did record significant progress and have developed a new budgeting process to prioritize achievement of this goal and future energy reduction targets going forward. In total, our work over the last five years significantly improved BD’s environmental performance, while also delivering more than $25 million in cost savings.
I also want to highlight BD’s commitment to worker safety, and to acknowledge that we fell short last year. BD has among the strongest track records for worker safety in the industry, and it is rare for BD to record any workplace fatality. But when such an event takes place, as it did last year, we conduct a thorough investigation: I am confident that everything has been done to understand the root cause of this event, and we have strengthened our safety practices to prevent any future occurrence.
Additional detail with regards to all of our 2015 goals is provided throughout this year’s report.
2014 Highlights
A number of the highlights featured in this year’s report are initiatives that fall outside of environmental performance. As such, they lack the measurement specificity typically found in our environmental reporting. That will change. Over the course of the next year, we will establish additional KPIs around each of our 2020 goals and put processes in place to collect and report this data.
Among the compelling stories featured in this year’s report:
In 2014, we launched BD FACSPresto™, an innovative near-patient CD4 counter system designed to bring CD4 testing closer to HIV/AIDS patients in resource-limited settings outside the U.S. Simple, robust and easy to use, this lightweight device offers a full menu of CD4, %CD4 and hemoglobin results in a single blood test to stage and monitor HIV/AIDS patients of all ages. Closer to home, our ongoing investment in the BD Helping Build Healthy Communities® program links intrinsically to the long-term economic sustainability of BD and the U.S. healthcare system. A multi-year initiative with Direct Relief and the National Association of Community Health Care Centers, BD and its partners are addressing unmet health needs in the U.S. by helping community healthcare centers implement innovative, replicable approaches to disease management, all with the intent of creating higher levels of care that lead to more positive health outcomes and reduced expense.
Among our global workforce, BD expanded its Volunteer Service Trip program in 2014 from one to four trips, sending out four teams of associate volunteers to address indigenous health needs in El Salvador, Haiti, Peru and Papua New Guinea. In West Africa, we worked with the CDC Foundationand our “Trusted Partners” Direct Relief, Heart to Heart International and AmeriCares to facilitate the donation and delivery of more than $900,000 in cash and BD products to protect healthcare workers fighting the Ebola virus outbreak, as well as help secure contributions from the private sector to mobilize the worldwide effort to treat the sick and slow transmission to surrounding populations.
In the arena of Global Health, we also remain actively engaged with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to improve laboratory systems and services in countries severely affected by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB). In 2014, we continued our PEPFAR “Labs for Life” program to enable BD associates with specific skills and training to help strengthen labs and healthcare systems in emerging markets, including collaboration in Indonesia to strengthen TB laboratories.
In the business world, there’s a strong urge to drive looking through the rearview mirror instead of the windshield. It’s important that we have a good sense of where we’ve been and what we’ve accomplished, but the future lies ahead of us. I am proud of the advancements BD has made over the last fiscal year, and I hope you enjoy reading about them in the 2014 Sustainability Report. I know there is much more work to be done, and I look forward to sharing our progress with you throughout the year.
About this reportThis report covers our global social and environmental performance during our fiscal year 2014 (October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2014) for BD and our subsidiaries, unless otherwise stated. This report supplements information in our 2014 Annual Report. We report annually on our sustainability performance – our last report was published in June 2013. This year, our reporting aligns more closely with version 4.0 of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. Reporting and performance data includes information on BD’s owned and operated facilities. We continually work to ensure that reporting on key sustainability performance indicators is as accurate and robust as possible. For this report’s content, we evaluated material issues and evaluated key priorities of stakeholders interested in BD’s performance, operations, products and services. We seek feedback from stakeholders each year, which informs our selection of content for sustainability reporting. To learn more about sustainability at BD, or to provide feedback on this report, please contact BD’s Office of Global Sustainability >View the GRI Index > |