subject: What Does Stat Mean When You're Shipping With A Medical Courier? [print this page] The medical delivery industry is a specialized subsection of the courier industry that only transports materials which are required for medical reasons. This includes things like blood which is needed for transfusions, all kinds of specimens which are required for testing, and even pharmaceuticals which are require for treatments.
There are New Mexico courier services that specialize in moving medical goods, because they need special permits and equipment in order to move this kind of cargo. As anyone who has ever had a health crisis knows, sometimes emergencies occur in the medical world, and in these situations it may not be fast enough to use a standard medical courier service in order to transport the required material. In these cases, a STAT courier service or STAT courier request will typically be placed.
STAT is a medical term which means to do something as fast as it is possible to do so. In the delivery industry, this means that a vehicle is going to immediately go and make the pickup of the delivery and drive it straight to its destination. On a normal delivery route, a truck might pickup several different cargos and make several deliveries, but on STAT runs, the truck is only going to be making a single delivery in order to make sure it gets done as fast as possible.
If a courier says that they offer STAT medical delivery, they are going to have vehicles which are dedicated solely to this purpose. This is because normally, a courier company is going to try and keep all of its vehicles as busy as possible at all times, in order to make sure that their business is profitable. However, this means that when an emergency comes in, vehicles wouldn't be available immediately, something that can't be risked when lives can hang in the balance, which is why a courier that offers emergency medical service must have dedicated emergency vehicles.
STAT is a term that is actually used across the medical industry, and not just when it comes to delivering medical material, but also by doctors in hospitals. Typical of all medical terminology it is a term which is derived from the Latin - in this case, the word Statim, which translates to "immediately". That means that anytime you hear the word STAT in any medical situation, delivery or otherwise, it means to make sure that something is done as fast as humanly possible.
