Internal Referrals

This page describes how you can manage internal referrals within OPERA as a provider.  If you want to know how to refer to primary care services, see the section on GOS18 referrals.

Receiving an internal referral

We will send an email to the main clinical email address that you have provided during your onboarding process, this can be viewed on the practice profile. If you need to change email preferences please see Changing email preferences.  You should ensure that this email address is regularly checked as we will send important details to this email regarding your referrals and other clinical activity within OPERA.

The email will look like this

Please note that details of the referral's URN and referring optical site are included.

Finding the referral on OPERA

You should use the URN search tool on the Referral Management screen to find the referral based on the URN provided in the email, in most cases the referral will be on the first screen if you check for it shortly after receiving the email.

You will be able to see the referral and the service that it is for:

You can view the referral by pressing the blue document icon and take appropriate actions to book the patient.

You can also this via the Clinical Dashboard:

Indicating your referral outcome

It's important that you complete the short form that accompanies each referral.  Simply click on the dark blue tab 'New Referral' to access the form.  Once you have confirmed the patient demographics you will see the following:

In most cases you will indicate that you have accepted the referral and make the necessary arrangements to see them, you will need to add the required clinical assessment for the patient to OPERA from the manage patient screen, e.g. if the request is for you to carry out a CUES examination you will find the patient on manage patient page and complete the screening form to indicate the start of the clinical assessment of the patient.  Once you have selected this, the referral tab will change to green and indicate completed.

If there is a reason to return the referral to the provider, please select the appropriate option and then complete the additional details to inform the referring practitioner that there has been an update on their referral. If you return a referral it will disappear from your dashboard and will be displayed on the referrers dashboard with the comments you have made.  The referring practice will also receive an email indicating that there has been an update.