BD Signs WEF’s zero health gaps pledge

BD announced it signed the World Economic Forum’s Zero Health Gaps Pledge, which reinforces the company’s longstanding commitment to help expand access and improve health equity in under-resourced communities around the world. The global, multi-sector pledge includes ten commitments which embed health equity principles across company strategy and social investments, ultimately aiming to accelerate progress toward equity and drive positive health outcomes.

“A health system’s ability to provide patients with access to critical, lifesaving health technologies should not be conditional on its geography, or its patients’ demographics and socioeconomic status,” said Tom Polen, chairman, CEO and president of BD. “For more than 125 years, we’ve been creating new technologies that improve the quality of life for billions of patients, but those innovations won’t matter if the people who need them most cannot access them. Using our scale and influence as a global medical technology company, we’re working alongside industry leaders, policymakers and advocates to advance meaningful change for patients around the world.”

From supplying syringes to enable the world’s first polio vaccine trial, to expanding access to HIV and tuberculosis testing, and delivering millions of tests and two billion syringes to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, BD has helped strengthen health systems and expand access to the most vulnerable populations around the world. In the company’s Fiscal Year 2022 environmental, social and governance report, BD stated how it will continue advancing health equity through three areas of opportunity:

• Technology and innovation. Leveraging the global reach of its products, research, solutions, and expertise to help ensure health systems, health care workers, and patients have access to life-saving technologies, regardless of geography, demographics, or socioeconomic status.
• Public-private partnerships. Partnering with a network of governments and global humanitarian organizations to help support and advocate for health systems that serve under-represented populations around the world and help create an enabling environment to increase health care access.
• Investment in health system strengthening. Making investments that build, strengthen, and maintain critical competencies and resources that are needed to improve the delivery of care within under-resourced settings.

Through this scope BD is committed to helping address the root causes of health inequities. The company’s efforts have included recent work in Kenya and Colombia to support early cervical cancer screening through self-collection; serving as a founding member of the Global HPV Consortium; expanding capacity for AMR diagnostics across low- and middle-income countries; providing point-of-care diagnostic tools to U.S.-based free and charitable clinics for on-site testing; and deploying volunteers to North Macedonia, Kosovo and Eswatini to help train health care workers in significantly under-resourced health systems.
MB Bureau