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Urgent requests

When a surface has to move today

Urgent requests are ordinary here. A discharge is confirmed for Friday and the surface the wound-care nurse specified is not in the building. A flap has been done and the post-operative plan needs a surface before the patient leaves recovery. A rented surface has failed in a house four hours from the nearest terminal. All of these are answerable, and none of them are answerable with a slogan.

So this page does not give you a number of hours. We coordinate expedited dispatch, and what that produces on your particular lane, on the day you ask, is something we find out and tell you before you commit to anything. A supplier who promises a delivery window before checking stock and the carrier is guessing with your discharge date.

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A desk at night lit by a lamp, with a landline handset lifted off its cradle, a printed schedule covered in handwriting and a cooling mug of coffee.
Coordinating an urgent order
What we do
Coordinate expedited freight against your date
What we do not do
Quote a delivery clock before checking the lane
First answer
Stock, lane and the earliest realistic receipt, in writing
Offshore
Alaska and Hawai‘i cannot be expedited to a mainland timescale

What happens when you flag a request as urgent

  1. 1

    Send the date and the constraint

    Not just "urgent". The date the patient moves, what that date depends on, and the hour after which the delivery is no longer useful. Those three facts change which options are real.

  2. 2

    Stock and configuration check

    We confirm the configuration is available and that it fits the frame at the receiving end. A surface that arrives on time and does not fit the frame has not solved anything.

  3. 3

    Lane and cutoff check

    We price the expedited options actually available on your lane against the carrier’s cutoff for the day. This is where an honest answer stops being the same as a fast one.

  4. 4

    A receipt date in writing

    You get the earliest date the carrier will commit to, the cost of getting there, and a plain statement of what could still move it. Then you decide.

  5. 5

    Receiving arranged

    Someone has to be there, the room has to be ready and the frame has to be in it. We confirm all three before dispatch rather than discovering them at the door.

Why there is no delivery guarantee on this page

Every part of a delivery timetable that we do not control is a part we will not promise. The carrier’s network, the weather on the lane, a closed terminal, a building that will not admit a delivery without a certificate of insurance filed three days ahead: none of those answer to us, and a guarantee that covers them is a guarantee written by someone who intends to apologize later.

What we control is the part in front of the carrier. Whether the right configuration is on the shelf, cleaned and checked. Whether the paperwork is done before the cutoff rather than after it. Whether the receiving end has been confirmed. Whether we told you the truth about the earliest realistic date instead of the date you wanted to hear. Those are the things that actually decide whether an urgent request lands, and they are the things this service is.

If you have been given a delivery promise by another supplier and are comparing, ask them one question: does that promise survive the carrier missing a lane? The answer tells you what the promise is worth.

What makes a request genuinely fast, and what slows it down

Speed is decided by information, not by urgency. The requests that move fastest arrive with the configuration named, the frame measured, the address complete down to the floor and the door, and one person who can answer a question in the next ten minutes. The requests that stall are the ones where the frame turns out to be an unknown width, the delivery address is a hospital campus with four docks, or nobody is authorized to approve the freight charge.

Expedited freight also has its own physics. Air movement is an option on some lanes, and the control unit contains a sealed rechargeable battery, so whether an air leg is available on a given day is a question we settle with the carrier rather than assume. Ground expedite is often faster in practice than people expect on the medium-length lanes, and slower than they hope on the long ones.

  • The date, and what the date depends on
  • The configuration, or the clinical requirement it must meet
  • The frame’s width and length, measured rather than guessed
  • A complete delivery address with floor, suite, dock or entrance detail
  • One decision-maker reachable now, with authority to approve freight
  • Any building rule that gates a delivery: booked elevators, insurance certificates, receiving hours

Emergencies that are not freight problems

Some urgent calls are about a surface already in the house. A control unit that will not power up, a system that has been off mains for longer than the battery covers, an alarm nobody has been shown how to read. Those are not dispatch problems and sending a second surface across the country is rarely the fastest fix.

Start with the two things that account for most of them. The control unit needs mains power, and Joerns states the battery provides approximately twelve hours of alternate power when the system is disconnected or the power fails — so a unit that has been unplugged since yesterday is a unit that has done what it was designed to do. And the storage switch must be in the battery-on position for the battery to recharge, which is why a system that was fine on delivery can be flat a week later. Tell us what the unit is doing and we will work through it with you before anything ships.

Where "overnight" is not physically available

Alaska and Hawai‘i have no ground lane from the mainland. Every surface going to either moves by ocean or by air, and lead times are counted in weeks rather than days: barge schedules for Alaska, an ocean container to O‘ahu and a second leg for the neighbor islands. Expediting those is possible in a limited way and expensive in a specific way, and the honest planning horizon is long. If a discharge in Anchorage or Hilo is being planned around equipment, start the conversation when the admission starts, not when the discharge does.

On the mainland, the Mountain West and High Plains carry the longest lanes and the fewest terminals in the country, and a home hours from the nearest hospital is usually hours from the nearest freight terminal too. That is a lead-time region, not a speed region, and pretending otherwise on a coverage page would be the sort of thing that reads well until someone relies on it.

Send this with an urgent request

  • The date the patient moves, and the latest useful hour on that date
  • What the date depends on, and how likely it is to change
  • The configuration named by the clinician, if one has been named
  • The bed frame at the receiving end: make, model, or measured width and length
  • The full delivery address, including floor, suite and entrance
  • The name and number of the person who will be there to receive it
  • Who approves the freight charge, and whether they are available now
  • Whether the receiving site has dock access or needs an inside delivery

Questions people ask us

How fast can you deliver?
That depends on stock, your lane and the carrier’s cutoff on the day, so we check all three and give you the earliest date the carrier will commit to, in writing, before you commit to anything. We do not publish a delivery-time guarantee, because no supplier controls the carrier network or the weather.
Do you offer overnight delivery?
We coordinate expedited dispatch, including air movement where it is available on the lane and the carrier will take the shipment. Whether that produces next-day receipt at a specific address is a question about that address and that day, and we answer it for your request rather than in general.
What is the single most useful thing I can do to speed this up?
Send the frame measurement with the first request. Fit is the most common reason an urgent order stops moving, and it is the one piece of information nobody at our end can find out without you.
Can you deliver to a hospital rather than a home?
Yes, but hospital campuses need more detail than a street address: the dock, the receiving hours, the department, and whether clinical engineering wants to receive the unit first. Send those with the request and the delivery is far less likely to sit on a dock.
What if the discharge date moves after you have shipped?
Tell us as soon as you know. If the surface is in transit we work with the carrier on the delivery date; if it has already arrived, it is set up and waiting, which is usually the better of the two problems.
Is there an after-hours number for emergencies?
Send the request through the form with the date and the constraint on it, and mark it urgent. We have not published staffed hours on this site and will not imply a line is answered at an hour we cannot stand behind.

Working against a date?

Send the date, the configuration and the frame measurement. You will get a stock answer, a lane answer and the earliest realistic receipt in writing — including if the honest answer is that it will not make your date.

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