What Procurement Needs in an Offshore Medical RFP: A Step-by-Step Specification Guide

What does an offshore medical RFP cover?

An offshore medical RFP is a request for proposal in which an offshore wind developer, operator or maritime company invites bids for medical support to a workforce that is beyond immediate reach of shore-based emergency services. Depending on the coverage model, the scope can include remote physician support (often called topside or telemedical support), on-site medics or paramedics, medical equipment and medication inventories, pre-placement medical logistics, and the clinical governance framework that holds all of it together. The common thread is that the buyer is not purchasing a product but a standing clinical capability: a service that must answer reliably at 03:00, give advice a trained first aider can actually execute, and stand behind that advice professionally.

That last point is what makes a medical RFP different from most procurement exercises. The specification is not primarily technical; it is about accountability. Industry good practice for offshore wind emergency response, the G+ and Energy Institute's Integrated Offshore Emergency Response guidelines, concluded from the sector's own incident data that the spectrum of offshore illness and injury is too broad for volunteer first aiders alone, and recommended professional support "either through telemedicine or on-site professional medical intervention, or both", delivered by specialist medical practitioners working under clinical governance. An RFP that specifies hardware and hours but not governance procures a phone number, not a medical service.

This guide is written for procurement leads and HSE managers assembling such an RFP for an offshore wind site, and it applies with minor translation to maritime operators contracting telemedical support for vessels. It sets out the regulatory baseline the document should reference, an eight-step process for building the specification, a requirements checklist, the cost logic for the business case, and the evaluation criteria that separate credible bidders from answering services. One framing rule applies throughout, and it is worth writing into the RFP itself: the remote clinician advises and supports the decision; authority over evacuation and operational response remains with the vessel master or the site duty holder.

What regulatory baseline should the RFP reference?

For vessels, the floor is set by the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006. Regulation 4.1 entitles seafarers to health protection and medical care as comparable as possible to that available to workers ashore, and Standard A4.1, paragraph 4(d) requires the competent authority to ensure "by a prearranged system that medical advice by radio or satellite communication to ships at sea, including specialist advice, is available 24 hours a day", free of charge to all ships irrespective of flag. The delivery architecture behind that obligation is described in IMO circular MSC/Circ.960 on medical assistance at sea, which names a Telemedical Assistance Service (TMAS) as one of the five elements of an optimal national system and specifies that a TMAS must be "permanently staffed by doctors qualified in conducting remote consultations and well versed in the particular nature of treatment on board ship", with telemedical advice "instantly accessible 24 hours out of 24". The same circular fixes the division of responsibility an RFP should mirror: the remote doctor carries responsibility for diagnosis and the treatment prescribed, while the captain remains responsible for examining the patient, administering treatment and the final decision.

For offshore wind structures, the anchor documents are industry good practice and, in the UK, the regulator's stated expectations. The G+ Integrated Offshore Emergency Response guidelines set out the layered model of trained first aiders backed by professional medical support under clinical governance. In August 2025, the UK Health and Safety Executive wrote to G+ setting out its expectations for first aid provision on onshore and offshore energy structures: fully trained first aiders should hold the GWO Enhanced First Aid qualification or equivalent, and where access to emergency services may be delayed, "the duty holder should consider whether access to an emergency doctor service (not necessarily the NHS) is needed to remotely support the emergency response" — a role HSE likens to the topside doctor who supports first aiders and medics on oil and gas installations. Other North Sea jurisdictions apply their own site rules, so a multi-jurisdiction RFP should require bidders to evidence compliance per site rather than assume one national regime covers the portfolio.

The training standards your workforce already holds are part of the baseline too. The Global Wind Organisation's Enhanced First Aid standard, currently V6, effective 10 March 2026, is explicitly built around remote clinical support: delivery of the training must be supported by arrangements ensuring a system for medical teleconsultation, and its learning objectives include giving assistance in remote areas using advanced emergency equipment and medical teleconsultation. In other words, if your technicians are EFA-trained, the standard they were trained to assumes a clinician is reachable. The RFP is where that assumption becomes a contract: list the applicable instruments (MLC 2006 and flag-state TMAS arrangements for vessels; G+ good practice, HSE expectations and site rules for wind structures; the GWO training standards your crews hold) and require bidders to state, clause by clause, how their service satisfies each one.

How do you assemble an offshore medical RFP, step by step?

Step 1 — Map the regulatory baseline for your site or flag. Before writing a single requirement, establish what already applies: MLC 2006 Standard A4.1 and the flag state's TMAS arrangements for vessels; the duty holder's first-aid needs assessment, G+ good practice and national regulator expectations for wind structures; and the GWO training standards held by the workforce. This mapping defines the minimum the contracted service must meet and prevents the RFP from either duplicating what a public TMAS already provides or, worse, assuming coverage that does not exist.

Step 2 — Define the coverage model. State explicitly whether you are procuring topside telemedicine only, on-site medics, or a hybrid, and for which assets, vessels, populations and project phases. Construction, commissioning and operations carry different headcounts, transfer patterns and risk profiles, and the model may legitimately differ between phases. If the decision between models is still open, say so and ask bidders to propose against your site risk assessment rather than guessing.

Step 3 — Specify availability and response-time requirements. State the coverage window (24/7 for most offshore operations), the maximum time to reach a physician (not a call handler) in minutes, the escalation path if the primary line goes unanswered, and any language requirements for the crews on site. MLC 2006 sets 24-hour availability as the public baseline for ships; a contracted service should commit to a defined, measured answer time on top of it. Require bidders to evidence historical performance against the answer time they offer, not merely promise it.

Step 4 — Require named clinical governance. Ask for a named medical director who owns the clinical protocols, the professional registration details and regulator of the clinicians who will actually take the calls, documented and versioned treatment protocols matched to your site's equipment and medication inventory, a clinical audit process, and professional indemnity arrangements covering remote advice in your jurisdictions. This is the heart of the RFP: it is what distinguishes a medical service from an answering service, and it is what G+ good practice means by specialist practitioners working under clinical governance.

Step 5 — Define the escalation and medevac interface. Specify how the remote clinician's advice feeds into your emergency response plan: who they hand over to, how they interface with the relevant rescue coordination centre and flag-state TMAS, what information accompanies an escalation, and how the provider participates in drills. Write the decision boundary into the contract in plain terms: the provider advises on clinical severity and supports the evacuate-or-treat-locally decision; the decision itself rests with the vessel master or site duty holder.

Step 6 — Set data protection and record-keeping requirements. Consultations generate health data, a special category of personal data under Article 9 of the GDPR. Require a stated lawful basis, named data storage locations and jurisdictions, defined retention periods, breach notification procedures, and a mechanism for the casualty and their onward treating clinicians to access records. MSC/Circ.960 is explicit that telemedical communications are subject to the strictest confidentiality and medical secrecy, and that records of consultations should be kept in a form that preserves them if responsibility is later examined.

Step 7 — Define KPIs and reporting. Specify the metrics the provider must report and at what interval: answer-time performance against the contracted standard, case volumes by category, outcomes (managed on site, evacuated, diverted), and any clinical audit findings. The reporting is not administrative overhead; it is the evidence that feeds back into your first-aid needs assessment and, over time, the data that shows whether the service is keeping people at work or merely logging calls.

Step 8 — Set evaluation criteria and weighting. Publish how bids will be scored, and weight clinical governance and demonstrated capability at least as heavily as price. Require evidence for every scored claim: protocol excerpts rather than brochure language, anonymised performance data rather than testimonials, named clinicians rather than organisational charts. A medical service procured on price alone tends to reveal its economics at the worst possible moment.

The RFP requirements checklist

The table below condenses the eight steps into a requirements checklist that can be lifted into an RFP schedule. Each row pairs the requirement with the reason it belongs in the document and the specific evidence to demand from bidders. The consistent principle is to ask for artefacts, not assurances: a provider that genuinely operates under clinical governance can produce protocol documents, registration details and performance data without difficulty, and a provider that cannot produce them within a bid timeline will not produce them at 03:00 either.

How do you quantify the business case for the medical scope?

Procurement will be asked what the medical line item buys, and the honest answer has two parts: a compliance layer that is not optional, and an avoided-cost layer that is quantifiable. The avoided-cost logic rests on a simple asymmetry. An unnecessary medical diversion or evacuation costs orders of magnitude more than a year of remote clinical cover, so a service that prevents even a small share of them pays for itself. A 2013 study by the International Maritime Health Association, covering 23,299 commercial vessels, found that about one in five ships is forced to divert for medical reasons in a year and itemised the average cost of a medical diversion at roughly €163,750 — widely cited, via maritime medical provider VIKAND, as US$180,000 — and concluded that judicious use of telemedical assistance could cut unnecessary medical evacuations by around 20 per cent, a saving it put at some €152 million a year. More recent industry analysis by Ideagen puts the effect higher for evacuations, suggesting 30 to 50 per cent of planned medical evacuations could be avoided through telemedicine consultation. IMO's own guidance makes the same point qualitatively: MSC/Circ.960 lists avoiding evacuation "as far as possible" among the core purposes of a telemedical service, because evacuation is by nature dangerous and expensive and should be reserved for medically justified cases.

To make this concrete for your own operation, build the exposure estimate from your numbers rather than industry averages: vessel or site headcount, historical medical incident rate, the day rate of the assets involved, typical deviation distance to the nearest suitable port or hospital, fuel and port costs, and the schedule impact of losing an asset mid-campaign. Multiply a realistic incident frequency by a realistic per-event cost and the annual exposure figure usually lands well above the cost of professional remote cover. That calculation, presented alongside the compliance baseline, is normally sufficient to justify the scope internally, and it gives evaluation a denominator: a bidder's price can be judged against the cost of the events the service exists to help avoid.

Two disciplines keep the business case honest. First, use industry-sourced figures only with their citations attached, as above, and resist the temptation to promise a specific avoidance percentage for your site; the published ranges are evidence that the effect is real, not a guarantee of its size. Second, keep the framing accurate: telemedicine does not decide against evacuation, it informs the decision. The value arises because a physician's assessment lets the master or duty holder make the evacuate-or-treat-locally call with clinical information instead of without it, and because three quarters of offshore medical interventions in the G+ incident data were completed locally, professional support offshore can help keep people at work rather than defaulting every case to shore.

What evaluation criteria separate credible providers?

Once bids arrive, the scoring framework does the real work. Weight clinical governance and clinical capability at or above the combined weight of price and commercial terms, because governance failures are the mode in which this category of service actually fails. Score whether the medical director is named and reachable, whether the clinicians who will take calls are identified with their registrations, whether protocols exist as versioned documents matched to your equipment, and whether the provider can show audit activity rather than merely an audit policy. Then score operational fit: evidence of measured answer-time performance, experience with your asset types and jurisdictions, a credible interface to your ERP and to the public TMAS and rescue coordination architecture, and a data protection posture that survives legal review of GDPR Article 9 processing.

Be alert to three recurring red flags. The first is the answering-service pattern: an attractive answer time that, on inspection, reaches a call handler or a nurse triage layer rather than a physician, with the doctor available on callback. If a callback model is offered, it should be declared and priced as such, not discovered in service. The second is the brochure-governance pattern: references to clinical excellence without a named accountable clinician, or protocols that are described but cannot be produced. The third is the compliance-transfer pattern: bids that quietly leave regulatory obligations with the buyer, for instance by assuming the flag-state TMAS will carry the clinical load while the contract provides only coordination. The public TMAS is a legal entitlement and a valuable one, but it owes your project no site-specific protocols, no knowledge of your medication inventory, no KPIs and no reporting; a contracted service is procured precisely to add what the public baseline does not.

Finally, write the advisory boundary into the contract as clearly as it appears in the RFP. The provider's obligation is to make a physician available within the contracted time, assess the casualty on the information available, give advice the responders on site can execute, document the consultation, and support the escalation decision with clinical reasoning. Authority over the vessel or the site, including the decision to evacuate, divert or continue operating, remains with the master or the duty holder, exactly as the international framework has always placed it. A provider that sells its service as taking that decision off your hands is mispricing a liability, not offering a feature; a provider that understands the boundary is the one you want on the other end of the line.

Sources

• ILO: Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 — Regulation 4.1 and Standard A4.1 (24-hour medical advice by radio or satellite, free of charge)
• IMO MSC/Circ.960, Medical Assistance at Sea (TMAS staffing, 24-hour accessibility, division of responsibility, avoidance of unnecessary evacuation, medical secrecy)
• G+ Integrated Offshore Emergency Response (IOER) good practice guidelines, 2nd edition (with the Energy Institute) — professional support recommendation, clinical governance, interventions completed locally
• HSE letter to G+ on first aid and F10 notification for the wind industry, 22 August 2025 (EFA-or-equivalent expectation; emergency doctor service to remotely support the emergency response)
• GWO: Enhanced First Aid Training Standard — current version (V6, effective 10 March 2026; medical teleconsultation requirement)
• VIKAND (Dr John Howe): Telemedicine at Sea — 2013 IMHA study, 23,299 vessels, US$180,000 average diversion cost, 20% reduction in unnecessary diversions
• International Maritime Health (2013), Henny et al. — business case data on maritime telemedicine and diversion costs
• Ideagen: How maritime telemedicine solutions are transforming medical care at sea (30–50% of planned evacuations avoidable through telemedicine consultation)
• Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) — Article 9, processing of special categories of personal data including health data