Sending a CUES referral to hospital

This help article describes the process for sending a CUES episode to hospital.  As with all CUES care, you must have completed a screening form first to ensure eligibility and then a clinician must have completed at least a Telemedicine form.  You can refer to hospital from:

• Telemedicine
• Face to Face
• OCT, IP
• Follow Up exams

In order to do this - select one of the HES referral outcome from the outcome list at the end of the form:

Once selected you might be asked to complete some additional information to supply to the hospital.  You can then submit the form, and, when you have returned to the referral management screen you will see that you referral now has a red tab:

Press the red tab to undertake the referral.  If you do not press this tab, the referral has not been made.

Confirming details

The next screen will ask you to confirm details.  If there is no NHS number, simply delete the 'waiting for population' text and leave blank, and correct any other details required including the permission to contact:

You can then press the blue forward arrow and you will be taken to the upload page.

Uploading images and other attachments

OPERA allows you to upload images in almost every format, OCTs as DCM or other file formats as well as PDF files.  Simply drag and drop the files you wish to upload, select the date that they were taken or produced, and the eye that they relate to.  This is important as these images are imported into a PACS system viewed by the hospital.

In this example we have uploaded an image of the eye and PDF of a recent letter from the hospital.

We can now press the blue forward button and select the provider.

Selecting a provider

We can now select our provider, first use the drop down on the left, in this case we will select Routine HES referrals, and then press 'Select Provider'.  You will see a list of providers that can offer services to your patient and their CCG.  Please note, you may need to scroll through the list to see all providers. If you need to change something, select 'Change Selection'

You can then press the blue forward button and answer any additional questions required by the provider and then the blue forward button again to see the final review page, at which point, if everything is satisfactory, then you can press submit.  You will see this screen:

Your referral is now complete and you will see details of its submission on your referral management screen:

Please note that the black and white 'P' indicates that your images have been uploaded to our PACS system.  You can view these by pressing the blue document icon on the right hand side of the green information tab. 

Reviewing the referral and image uploads

Here you can see a copy of the referral, and also the images and PDF that were uploaded.  Clicking on "View images in PACS" will show you the images and PDF uploaded onto the PACS system which is accessed by the hospital.  If this was an eRS referral - you will also be able to see a copy of the confirmation letter and download any copies you may wish to keep on a local system.

Last reviewed: 05/01/2023