Cath Lab Digest

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     In September 2008, Tom Dugan became the President for Smith & Nephew’s North American Advanced Wound Management Division (St. Petersburg, Fla). Tom joined the company and wound care market with an impressive 28 years of medical device experience. He began his career working for Johnson & Johnson’s Critikon division. Following several sales, marketing, and corporate management positions, Tom became Senior VP for SonoSite (Bothell, Wa), the worldwide leader in hand-carried ultrasound. Wearing multiple entrepreneurial hats, Tom was responsible for the company’s US business. At the time, SonoSite was competing against larger corporations such as General Electric, Phillips, and Siemens, yet controlled more than a 60% market share.

     Tom was delighted with the opportunity to work for Smith & Nephew. “Over the years I’ve had a lot of different opportunities, working for different types of businesses,” he says. “I’ve worked for smart, interesting people and I’ve tried to take away something from each one of those individuals. This has helped me tremendously in coming into this role [with Smith & Nephew] because this is a very different business,” Tom explained.

     Smith & Nephew’s wound management division’s overall mission includes a broad portfolio of products for all stages of wound treatment. “We are very clinician-focused — that is, focused on education, support, and proper utilization of products. Smith & Nephew has a long heritage in this area. The wound management business is what Smith & Nephew was founded on 152 years ago. We’ve been responsible for a great deal of innovation and a significant amount of new technology in the market and we continue to build on that.”

     Tom finds that some of the most fulfilling aspects of working with his division include the company’s launch into the negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) arena, with the recent introduction to the US market of foam dressing products, and the new RENASYS™ line of pumps. Tom enjoyed getting the organization focused on taking full advantage of all opportunities, spending a significant amount of time with customers in order to fully identify their individual needs.

      “The key is being close to your customer and understanding what their true clinical needs are and ensuring that we have the right product and solution to help them with that,” he says. “Whether it’s infection management with a silver-coated dressing or negative pressure where we’ve got different dressing interfaces for clinicians for the first time. Given our broad portfolio of advanced wound care products, Smith & Nephew is somewhat unique in terms of our ability to provide for the needs of all the different points on the wound care spectrum. And we’re seeing a lot of interest not only from the wound care nursing and critical care community, but also from hospital administrators who are seeing benefits of working with Smith & -Nephew in related areas. For example, when a patient goes through an extended, very complicated trauma or reconstructive procedure where you might be using external fixation, the big worry is postsurgical site infections. We offer a number of products that can address this. We have dressings like ACTICOAT™ that when used post operatively can proactively address the potential for surgical site infections. VERSAJET™ hydrosurgery products for debridement, and our new line of NPWT products.