Purchase price is one of eight lines in the cost of owning a hospital bed. What the other seven are, which of them actually moves the total, and how to get the numbers out of a bidder before you award.
Bed tenders are decided on the delivered price of the bed, and the bed is the smaller half of what the hospital ends up paying. Nobody can quote a real ten year figure without knowing the model, the ward and the exchange rate on the day, so what follows is the structure of the cost and what drives each line. That is more useful at evaluation than a number somebody invented.
| Cost line | What determines it |
|---|---|
| Purchase and delivery | Bed class, quantity, import duty, freight, and whether installation is included |
| Mattress, replaced on a cycle | Mattress specification, cover integrity, laundering practice. Expect to buy several mattresses per bed over ten years |
| Wear parts | Castors, crank handles, side rail latches, handset, mattress platform panels. All consumable in a busy ward |
| Powered component replacement | Actuators, control box, handset. Applies only to electric beds and dominates their cost line |
| Planned maintenance labour | Hours per bed per year from your own biomedical team, times the number of beds |
| Breakdown response | Call out frequency, whether parts are held locally, and whether the work is under contract or ad hoc |
| Downtime | Bed days lost while the bed waits for a part. In a full hospital this is the largest hidden line |
| Disposal and replacement timing | Whether the bed reaches ten years at all, and what it is worth at the end |
The mattress. Over ten years a hospital will buy the mattress several times over, and the cheap foam mattress that gets substituted into a bed lot is replaced far more often than a properly specified one. It also fails at the cover, which is what lets fluid into the foam and turns a cleanable item into a disposable one. This is the line most often cut at tender and it has the clearest return.
Whether spares are held in Bangladesh. A castor that arrives in a week costs the price of a castor. The same castor on an eleven week import lead time costs eleven weeks of a bed out of service, plus the staff time chasing it. Ask bidders for a priced spares list at bid stage and ask specifically what they hold in country, then treat that answer as part of the price.
Handset and actuator reliability on electric beds. The handset is the part that gets dropped, soaked and wiped with a wet cloth, and its ingress protection rating is the single most predictive specification for the maintenance cost of a powered bed. Actuators are replaced rather than repaired, so their price and availability sets the floor for what an electric bed costs to run.
What happened before commissioning. Beds delivered early into a building still under construction sit in dust and monsoon humidity for months. Cranks seize, panels mildew, castor bearings corrode, and the warranty clock runs while the bed is in a store room. This costs nothing to avoid and it is one of the most common ways a bed loses years off its life before a patient touches it.
Do the same exercise for the bedside cabinet and the overbed table while you are at it. They are cheap enough to be ignored and they fail on exactly the same parts, which are castors and latches.