Referral Copies - The Pink Tab

When a referral is sent to an internal provider, or to a triage service, it is assigned immediately to that service.  This means that it is no longer visible to the referring practice in OPERA.

To resolve this issue, and to provide facilities for a practice to monitor triage outcomes, then a duplicate of the referral is made available to the user, a so called Pink Tab.

Internal Referrals

If your referral is sent to an internal provider, the referral is sent to the provider as usual and you will see the following on your referral management screen:

This provides a copy of the referral for your records, and indicates the original OPR number of the referral sent to the provider and the details of that provider.  You can access the documents as usual from the document icon should you wish to print out the referral.

Triaged Referrals

If you work in an area where referrals are triaged, you will see the following:

This provides a copy of the referral for your records, and indicates the original OPR number of the referral sent to the provider and the current details of the referral's status.  When first sent the referral will be in the PES triage queue, as shown above.  When a triage decision is made, you will see an update on the triage status, indicating the outcome and the provider that the referral has been sent to:

In this case the triage decision was to send the referral to a different provider than that selected, and the name of the provider is shown. 

Purpose

The purpose of the referral copy function is to ensure that referrers always have view of their referral status and can download and keep a copy of their referral document should they wish.  More information on referring in OPERA can be found in the Making a Referral help pages.