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Fix or cancel a referral after sending

A sent referral can be corrected without cancelling, re-sending, or duplicating it, and everyone who already has it is told what changed. What a referral cannot be is taken back. Here is what Update details fixes, what happens to the patient link, what to do about the mistakes it cannot fix, and how to print a referral or save it as a PDF.

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What can change, and what cannot

Most of a referral's content can be corrected after sending. The patient's first and last name, date of birth, email, and phone; the notes; the reason codes; and the clinical context, whether that is a tooth chart, animal details, or risk factors. Corrections work on archived referrals and on booked ones.

The rest is fixed the moment you send. The recipients, the referral type, the category and specialty, and the referral's status cannot be edited, and there is no cancel, delete, or unsend anywhere in Syncroly. Once a referral has reached a practice, that disclosure has happened and nothing undoes it. The fields you cannot change are left out of the correction sheet rather than shown grayed.

Some of it is a clinician's to change. Where your practice requires a clinician to send referrals, somebody who is not one keeps the patient and contact details, and on a veterinary referral the owner's information and the animal details. The reasons, the notes, and the clinical context are left out of their sheet, with a line in their place saying a clinician makes those changes. See Send a referral for clinician review.

Correct a referral

  1. In the sidebar, open Sent.
  2. Open the referral that needs fixing.
  3. In the top right of the page, select Update details.
  4. Change the fields that are wrong. The sheet holds the patient details, the reasons, the notes, and the clinical context, and nothing else.
  5. Select Review changes.
  6. Read the before and after of every change. Only what is listed will change.
  7. If you changed the patient's name or date of birth, confirm the attestation: This is the same patient. I'm fixing an error in their information.
  8. Select Save changes.
The Update details sheet open over a sent referral, explaining that it fixes patient or contact details, reasons, notes, and clinical context, and that locked fields stay as they were sent. It holds the patient details, the reason chips, the notes, and the clinical context, with a footer offering Cancel and Review changes.
The correction sheet. The fields that cannot change are left out, not grayed.
The review stage of the Update details sheet after correcting the patient surname. One row names the last name field and shows the old surname, an arrow, and the corrected one, above a required attestation checkbox reading that this is the same patient and the sender is fixing an error in their information, with a note that it is required when the name or date of birth changes because a different person needs a new referral.
The review stage after a name change, with the attestation it requires.

The attestation is required before a change to the name or date of birth will save, because a correction and a swap to a different patient look the same on a form.

If a colleague corrected the same referral while your sheet was open, your save is refused rather than overwriting theirs. Everything you typed stays on screen; refresh the referral and save again on top of their version.

Review changes stays disabled until something differs from what was sent.

What the other side sees

A correction is not a quiet edit. Each receiving practice that can already see the referral gets a Referral updated banner listing the before and after of what they have not yet seen, and the change is recorded in the referral's history. The actor is shown as the referring practice, never a named person. A Choice recipient the patient shared with later sees only corrections made from their own disclosure onward.

The referral is never re-sent and never duplicated: everyone keeps working the same referral, now with the right details.

There is no cancel. Here is what to do instead

When the mistake is one the correction sheet cannot reach, usually the wrong recipient or a referral that should never have gone out, there are three things you can do.

Archive it. Archiving takes the referral out of the active lists and into the Archived view, and because a referral is one shared record, it leaves the active list on the receiving side as well. Nothing is destroyed and nothing is revoked: the record, its history, and its links stay intact, and unarchiving brings it back.

Send the right referral. Create a new referral to the correct recipient. If the wrong one was a Choice referral the patient had not shared yet, no receiving practice saw the patient details at all, and archiving it closes it out.

Tell the recipient. On a Direct referral the recipient already has the details, so archiving does not take them back. The Conversations card on the referral messages that practice directly; a one-line note that the referral was sent in error is usually enough.

  1. In the sidebar, open Sent.
  2. Open the referral.
  3. In the top right of the page, open the ... menu.
  4. Select Archive.
  5. In the Archive Referral dialog, select Archive to confirm. The referral moves to the Archived filter, where you can find it, and Unarchive it, anytime.
The overflow menu open on a sent referral, offering Resend Link, Print, and Archive.
The `...` menu on a sent referral. There is no cancel or delete item here, or anywhere.
Fix or cancel a referral after sending | Syncroly