Procurement & Frameworks
You are not buying a van. You are buying a licence, an insurance limit, a lifting inspection, a crew and a paper trail, and three of those five can be checked before you commit.
OMS Clinical Team
Product Specialists
Most people book medical equipment transport the same way: three quotes, pick the middle one, hope. That works until the day a couch arrives with a cracked hydraulic column, or an analyser is signed for by somebody who had no idea it needed to stay upright, and the conversation turns to who pays for it.
The awkward part is that the cheapest quote and the most expensive one look identical on paper. Both say a van, two people and a date. What separates them is a handful of facts that are not in the quote at all, and three of those facts can be checked before you commit, for free, in about ten minutes.
This guide is about choosing the company. If you have already chosen one and want to know what to do before the van arrives, the companion piece on planning the move itself covers measuring routes, disconnection and packing.
A goods vehicle operator's licence is required in Great Britain for vehicles over 3.5 tonnes gross plated weight used for hire or reward. Since 21 May 2022 the threshold for international work has been lower, at 2.5 tonnes. A firm carrying its own goods in a van of 3.5 tonnes or under generally does not need one at all, which is worth knowing, because it means the absence of a licence is not automatically a red flag. It depends entirely on the vehicle they intend to send.
So the question is not "are you licensed". It is "what vehicle is coming, and if it is over 3.5 tonnes, what is your licence number". A company that does this work daily will answer both without pausing.
The operator licence record is public. You can search it by operator name or by licence number, and it will show you the licence type, whether it is currently valid, and how many vehicles the operator is authorised to run. That last figure is quietly useful: an operator authorised for two vehicles who is promising you a four van lift on a fixed date is telling you something about how the day will actually go.
Every transport company will send you an insurance certificate if you ask. The certificate is not the useful part. Goods in transit cover is usually written with a limit per load and, separately, a limit per item, and it is the second number that catches people out.
A load of consumables is rarely worth more than the per-load limit. A single ultra-low temperature freezer, a treatment couch or a bench analyser can quietly exceed a per-item limit on its own. If the cover is stated as a round figure for the vehicle, ask explicitly whether one item worth that much is covered to its full value, and get the answer in writing.
Two other questions are worth asking while you have their attention:
None of this means a lower limit is unacceptable. It means you want to know the number before the vehicle is loaded rather than afterwards.
If a tail lift is involved, it is lifting equipment under the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, and it must be thoroughly examined by a competent person. The interval depends on what rides on the platform: at least every twelve months where it lifts goods only, and every six months where it lifts people. A handler standing on the platform to steady a monitor makes it the six month case, and that is exactly how most medical equipment is loaded.
Reports of thorough examination are statutory documents and are kept for at least two years. Asking for the date of the last one is a reasonable question, and the speed of the answer tells you more than the date does. A firm that has it to hand runs a maintained fleet. A firm that has to go and look has usually not been asked before.
Equipment that has been in clinical use does not leave a site clean by default. In NHS acute settings, HTM 01-01 and the trust decontamination policies written to it expect an item to carry a decontamination declaration before it is sent away for service, maintenance, repair or disposal, so that whoever handles it next knows what they are handling.
Outside the NHS the paperwork is not always mandated, but the logic does not change: the crew loading a suction unit or a couch has no way of knowing what has been on it. Decide in advance who is signing that declaration, because the answer is almost never the transport company. They are the recipient of it, not the author.
A quote for medical equipment transport that consists of one number and a date is not a quote, it is a guess with an invoice attached. The variables that decide what the day actually costs are all things that can be stated up front:
A specialist will have answers to all six because they have been caught by all six. A general haulier quoting on weight and postcode usually has not thought about any of them, which is why their number is lower.
None of these are trick questions. They are simply things a firm that moves medical equipment regularly will find unremarkable, and a firm that moves pallets will find surprising:
The last one matters more than it looks. Medical equipment that has been moved and will not restart is a common and genuinely ambiguous situation, because the cause might be transport damage, might be a disconnection done badly at the other end, and might be a fault that was already there. A supplier who has a considered answer has been through it. A supplier who says it has never happened is either very lucky or very new.
Choosing the company is the first of two jobs. The second is preparing for the move, which is where most of the avoidable damage actually comes from: routes that were measured in the room rather than along the corridor, equipment nobody was authorised to disconnect, and insurance that turned out to cover the vehicle rather than the contents. That is covered in detail in the planning guide.
If you would rather not run this process at all, our own medical equipment transport service exists for exactly this work, with an on-call dispatcher for urgent moves. Either way, ask the questions above. A supplier who is happy to answer them is the point, whoever you end up booking.
