For more than a year now, individuals, communities, and healthcare providers around the world have confronted the challenges of COVID-19. These events have tested us, and our employees have responded with inspiring resilience, innovation, and caring for one another and the communities where we live and work.
While some regions are cautiously re-opening and beginning their recovery, others continue to struggle. We thank healthcare workers for their continued tireless efforts on the frontlines around the world.
Intuitive continues to do our part to prioritize the health, safety, and support of our customers and employees as we manage the impact of COVID-19 in our communities and begin to consider the new “normal.”
Throughout the past year and a half, we have maintained regular contact with our customers, listening so we can be responsive to their current needs and well positioned to anticipate their next steps. We will continue our close collaboration to help customers adjust to shifting clinical, economic, and operational priorities.
Recognizing the economic stress that COVID-19 placed on hospitals and healthcare systems, Intuitive introduced a series of programs to provide financial relief to customers. This financial support, totaling more than $80 million, included service credits, warranty extensions and flexible payment terms. The timeliness and the design of the program have been well-received by our customers.
As hospitals recover from treating COVID-19 patients, many now face significant backlogs of patients awaiting surgical procedures. Intuitive stands with our customers and continues to assist them as they cope with these rapid changes. During the pandemic, we accelerated our expansion of remote learning and proctoring opportunities, facilitated virtual peer-to-peer observations and events, and made hands-on technology training more available and locally accessible than ever before. In addition, we have helped customers respond to rapid changes in demand by relocating existing systems, and providing temporary system loans, where needed.
Although situations vary around the globe, we are phasing in a return to in-office work at many of our locations. We will continue to prioritize the health and safety of our employees, and we remain mindful that our teams continue to balance work (and work-from-home) with caring for their families and their broader communities. Importantly, we realize that returning to old routines does not mean that things will be back to “how they were.” As we return to Intuitive offices, we will do so in consultation with local teams, and under the guidance of local health authorities.
The overall well-being of our workforce has been a top priority. During this period, we have expanded employee resource programs, including our expanded paid sick leave programs, and employee assistance programs. Employee well-being and support will continue to be a focus for us. In addition, we will also continue to provide programs and equipment so that our employees working remotely can be successful and productive.
Intuitive employees have actively engaged in the COVID-19 response. The Intuitive Foundation, which is, among other functions, the philanthropic arm of Intuitive, has led many of these efforts, relying heavily on in-kind volunteer efforts of engineers and others within Intuitive.
Among other successes, our teams helped to source, assemble, and distribute more than 1,000,000 face shields and other pieces of PPE. Early on, we focused efforts on donations to provide PPE in China, where the pandemic first emerged. Then, as the pandemic shifted, we took action to mass produce PPE in our facilities and distribute them quickly throughout the communities surrounding our headquarters as well as elsewhere in the U.S., Europe and Mexico.
The Intuitive Foundation established a matching donation drive that increased the annual employee match limit, allowing employees to magnify the impact of their individual donations to non-profits of their choice around the world. The Foundation also established a separate grant program to provide small grants to activities designed to fight against COVID-19.
In addition, employees around the world have independently participated in local opportunities to give blood, support food banks, and provide other volunteer support to their hospitals and communities. Intuitive and the Intuitive Foundation will continue to find and connect employees to opportunities to use their unique expertise to help communities respond to COVID-19 and build future resilience.
Some of the statements here are forward-looking statements, for example, statements using words such as “estimates,” “projects,” “believes,” “anticipates,” “plans,” “expects,” “intends,” “may,” “will,” “could,” or “should”. These forward-looking statements are necessarily estimates reflecting the best judgment of management and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those suggested by such statements. They should, therefore, be considered in light of various important factors, including, but not limited to, the following: the requirement to comply with evolving COVID-19 guidelines issued by local health authorities, our ability to obtain accurate procedure volume as COVID-19 continues to affect regions we serve, the risk that COVID-19 outbreaks could lead to material delays and cancellations of procedures, curtailed or delayed capital spending by hospitals and disruption to our supply chain, closures of our facilities, delays in surgeon training, delays in gathering clinical evidence, diversion of management and other resources to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak; the impact of global and regional economic and credit market conditions on healthcare spending; the risk that the COVID-19 virus disrupts local economies and causes economies to enter prolonged recessions and other risk factors under the heading “Risk Factors” in our report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, as updated by our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.