Bard/Becton Dickinson

Manufacturers

C.R. Bard, Inc. was founded in 1907 in New York City (though it wasn’t formally incorporated until 1923). Bard is one of the original innovators in the catheter space, introducing the foley catheter in 1934 and the first latex balloon catheter in 1960. The company began expanding outside of catheters in the 1960s, and became publicly traded in 1963. The company was recently acquired by Becton Dickinson in 2017, in a massive $24 billion deal.

The company’s core values are quality, integrity, service, and innovation, with the guiding principles of: passion for their work, being indispensable to their customers; fostering creative thinking; highest ethical behavior; demonstrating ownership and pride; leadership by example; playing to win; and being open and inclusive. Their mission statement is to advance lives and the delivery of healthcare by profitably developing, manufacturing, and marketing value-driven products which meet the quality, integrity, service, and innovation expectations of our customers and patients while providing opportunities for their employees. As a result, they will optimize shareholder value and be a respected worldwide healthcare company.

Like Coloplast® and ConvaTec®, Bard quietly acquired a durable medical equipment distributor named Liberator Medical Holdings for $181 million in 2016. Unlike the other distributors who are owned by manufacturers, Liberator Medical proudly displays Bard’s logo on their website.

Bard’s earliest specifically intermittent catheter (that is, not a generic urethral catheter) was approved by the FDA in 1991; Bard’s signature line of catheters is the Magic3® catheter. Despite Bard being one of the pioneers of the catheter industry, the Magic3 brand isn’t homegrown – it was acquired by Bard with a purchase of Rochester Medical, another catheter manufacturer, in 2013 for $262 million.

Bard doesn’t seem to offer personalized support for users of its products – instead, they maintain the Bard Community, where catheter users and their caretakers share blogposts about their lives and stories, as well as a set of content gathered under the name Yes I Can. This latter set of content is more about providing practical tips on living with a spinal cord injury or a long-term disability.

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