We find ourselves in uncertain times. The Coronavirus pandemic is affecting our personal and professional lives in completely unexpected and ever-evolving ways. On behalf of everyone at Galderma, I would like to express our solidarity to you. As efforts continue at national and global levels to battle the COVID-19 outbreak, your health and wellbeing together with that of your families, our employees and patients, and communities continue to be our primary focus.
While first and foremost a humanitarian crisis, this public health emergency is having a wide-ranging impact on each of our businesses and ways of working. As the COVID-19 outbreak lingers, I wanted to take the opportunity to reassure you that Galderma is making it a priority to seek to sustain for you the highest possible levels of service and product availability. In this context, we are exploring how we can continue to engage together in new, alternative ways as well as be partners to support you and your business through this time of crisis.
We have also activated our business continuity plans, where we have strong processes, robust systems, and dedicated support teams in place to keep the impact of the crisis to a minimum. This has involved implementing flexible working arrangements for many of our employees, to be able to continue our engagements. This holds especially true for our Manufacturing employees who are working under challenging precautionary measures to keep supply chain disruption to a minimum, so that we can continue to supply you with important medicines and products throughout this crisis.
In these challenging times, I find it humbling to see how people are coming together to help one another. As a company, we are also doing our best to rise to the occasion by leveraging our capabilities and capacities to support community initiatives wherever we can and alleviate the impact. This includes donating our additional stock of face masks to help caregivers on the frontline of this health crisis, along with evaluating how we can reconvert some of our manufacturing to produce much needed hand sanitizers and gels. We are here to support you as well, so please do not hesitate to get in touch and let us know how we can help you overcome this unprecedented challenge.
I had the good fortune to train not only as an MD, but also to get a degree in Public Health, where I as part of the curriculum spent months learning about (past) epidemics and how to combat them. In my first mission in Africa, I experienced first-hand the primordial importance of public health, with the heroic daily work of unselfish healthcare workers willing to risk their lives as they dealt with the burgeoning HIV crisis on the continent. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the currently tireless working healthcare practitioners and public health experts who are going beyond the call of duty to care for those affected and contain this crisis. On behalf of each and every employee at Galderma, I would like to extend our sincerest thanks to these unsung heroes in the healthcare profession.
Thank you too for your continued loyalty and trust in Galderma. Rest assured that our commitment and responsibility towards you, our employees and the people we serve has never been greater.
Best wishes,
Flemming Ornskov, MD, MPH
CEO, Galderma SA