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Customer Relationships

Contents

About This Report

HSE Performance

Social Performance

Economic Performance

Looking Ahead

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Our relationship with our customers is key to Smith & Nephew's success. Our sales teams play a vital role in this, extending the contact with our customers and the level and quality of service we offer. Our sales force numbers have increased considerably in the last few years. In the US, we have introduced specialised sales teams in all four of our businesses to drive service quality to higher levels.

Smith & Nephew is committed to delivering innovative, cost-effective healthcare solutions to benefit healthcare professionals and their patients through improved treatment, ease and speed of product use and reduced healthcare costs. We will continue to provide education and training support for healthcare professionals and maintain investment in research and development.

Many of our products address the diseases of old age. In some cases it may not be possible for the patient to be actually ""cured"" but our products seek to improve the quality of life for all patients treated and this is an important aspect built into our research and development programmes.

To help us to achieve this goal, each of Smith & Nephew's businesses works closely with their customers and key clinical opinion leaders to gain a greater appreciation of their clinical needs. This allows us to be both more responsive to their current requirements and better able to anticipate and shape the future direction of clinical practice.

The Orthopaedic Reconstruction and Trauma businesses operate MOBILAB, a state of the art mobile training center in the US. MOBILAB takes the group's advanced training facilities direct to hospitals enabling surgeons to train with their operating team on their own hospital site.

This is in addition to the training facilities available at our Reconstruction and Trauma headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, and the training unit in the UK at Warwick which was specifically developed to train surgeons on the BIRMINGHAM HIP^◊ Resurfacing system. Smith & Nephew also pioneers new techniques and products - often in conjunction with leading physicians and scientists - which need to be introduced to the medical community. An example of this process in action is the InVentures BioSkills Lab at our Endoscopy facilities in Massachussetts., where our engineers worked with more than 150 surgeons on new product ideas. This helps accelerate the progress of knee and shoulder surgery by enabling surgeons who have an idea or a new technique to develop the concept in our state-of-the-art facility. During 2007 our Advanced Wound Management business trained over 100,000 nurses and clinicians around the world.