Delivering for our customers

“Forever caring means we will never stop listening, learning and improving our solutions for customers and patients. Today, we are working closer than ever with our customers. We put thier needs at the heart of our innovation so that more people can live their lives to the fullest. We're embedding an innovation mindset and continue to prioritise safety, quality and efficacy in our solutions.”

Dr. Divakar Ramakrishnan, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer & Head of Research and Development

Engaging with customers

Our interaction with customers is fundamental to our success and goes beyond building trust and enhancing our reputation. By listening to the people who use our products, we can identify ways to improve both the products and services that we offer. We engage with our end-users in four main ways:

• Our me+™ support programmes and our HSG services
• Targeted research programmes specifically designed to gain insights for product and service innovation
• Responding to specific questions raised with us
• Tracking and responding to complaints about our products or services

We also engage extensively with healthcare professionals through our commercial teams, briefing on product capabilities and new innovations and through professional learning such as the Convatec Academy for Professional Education. We believe educating healthcare professionals is critical to improving care for patients, and as such offer several education programmes, such as a partnership with the Welsh Wound Innovation Centre.

Sustainable product design

We recognise that customers care about the environment, and in 2022, we embedded a set of digital tools within our new product development process to help us improve the environmental sustainability of our products. These Green Design Guidelines serve to educate and empower product developers to make environmentally sustainable design choices, while allowing us to track that all new products improve upon the environmental sustainability of previous products.

In 2023, we assessed six launches alongside using the digital tools to evaluate design changes. During 2024 we will ensure that we have a complete and actionable set of carbon intensity data recorded in our digital product sustainability tool for all Convatec manufactured products and raw materials. An additional target has been set to ensure data is incorporated into our new product design process for carbon foot-printing, as we continue to expand the impact of the platform.

We maintain a company policy on our approach to ethical issues relating to the new product development process.

Product safety

Product safety is a key issue for our customers and pivotal in earning Convatec a reputation as a trusted provider. Regulators consider most of the products and solutions we develop to be of low risk to users. Nevertheless, we have a rigorous and robust supplier audit mechanism and quality management system. Notified bodies (such as BSI) also review our quality processes and procedures.