DePuy President Resigns, Leaving Hip Recall Mess Behind
The president of Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Orthopedics is quitting, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Bloomberg News. David Floyd turned in his resignation last week and plans to leave the company at the end of this month.
His sudden departure comes just months after DePuy Orthopaedics recalled its ASR XL Acetabular hip system in August 2010. The recall was triggered because of unusually high failure rates–around 13% of all patients with the DePuy ASR hips needed at least a second surgery to fix problems with the hip implant.
David Floyd became president of DePuy in 2007. Floyd also spent time as a top executive at Zimmer Holdings, Inc. Zimmer is the maker of the Durom Hip Implant, which stopped sales of the Durom Metasul hip cup in July 2008 because patients were also reporting problems with those hip implants.
Back in 2007 the Ft. Wayne Indiana Journal Gazette reported on Floyd’s first week on the job, writing that “expectations are high for the industry veteran with local connections who is expected to improve growth and innovation at the company.”
New York Times Reports
The New York Times reports that DePuy racked up a $280 million dollar charge in their 4th quarter to pay for the recall and the company faces more than 500 lawsuits from patients. That number is expected to grow as more people begin experiencing problems from the bad ASR hip implants. Now 4 years after Floyd took over, DePuy finds itself in the middle of a medical product liability nightmare with no one yet named to permanently take the helm of the company.
