COVID-19 has had a profound impact on all our lives and sadly with tragic consequences for too many families. Our business priority is protecting the health and wellbeing of our associates, whilst maintaining the supply of medical devices to our customers throughout the world and, especially, to the healthcare services and professionals who rely on our products on a daily basis.
In all areas of our business we follow current advice from government and public health authorities. Our executive team review the situation daily, share information and listen to our associates.
We have completed Risk Assessments for COVID-19 that not just covers our associates’ time at work, but risks around travel and being at home as well. These identified additional measures which have been implemented to ensure the safety of all our associates and to allow all our manufacturing sites to remain open.
We are particularly grateful to those of our associates who continue to support our efforts to maintain operations at all of our sites.
PROTECTING THE HEALTH, SAFETY AND WELL-BEING OF OUR PEOPLE
We communicate regularly with associates and recognise the new challenges that they face, and we have provided resources to support their wellbeing. We have made adjustments to our work place to support social distancing. Our IT team worked diligently to strengthen our IT infrastructure to support those working from home.
SUPPORTING THE GOVERNMENT
A group of engineers from our Research and Development team worked tirelessly to respond to the UK government’s Ventilator Challenge. We have offered our expertise in design, manufacturing, testing, integration and other areas to support the roll out of diagnostic point of care testing and the administration of vaccine once it becomes available.
MAINTAINING SUPPLY TO CUSTOMERS
For more than six decades, we’ve put our customers at the heart of everything we do. Our sales teams have done an outstanding job in maintaining relationships with our customers across the world.
We are grateful for the hard work of our manufacturing, supply chain and quality colleagues, who have been instrumental in keeping our operations running.
The service we have received from our own suppliers has been exceptional through a difficult period and demonstrates how everybody throughout the supply chain is working hard to maintain supply.
MINIMISING RISK
We have revised our working practices and arrangements and meet the Government’s ‘COVID-19 Secure’ principles:
- We’ve increased education about the symptoms of the virus, the need for frequent handwashing and use of sanitising gel
- We’ve communicated the conditions when self-isolation and shielding are required
- We have cancelled conferences and exhibitions and stopped all travel unless it is business critical
- Those associates who can work from home have been doing so since March 2020
- Those that need to go into the workplace, including in supply, distribution, manufacturing and quality are doing so with enhanced safety and hygiene standards and strict social distancing measures.
- We’ve intensified our focus on the daily cleaning regime in our sites
- We’ve introduced changes to reception, work areas, break areas, washrooms and meeting rooms to support social distancing
- If the 2m is not possible, we have put in other measures to manage transmission risk
- We’ve introduced cohorts and minimised the person to person transfer of item.