How to handle 'Modification of clinical information is not permitted this close to the appointment'

Hi,

While testing several scenarios, we encountered the following message when attempting to add additional attachments to a referral that already has a booked appointment:

“Modification of clinical information is not permitted this close to the appointment.”

We understand this message is being triggered by the referral letter setting configured against our service, where the deadline is set to 1 day before the appointment within the old NHS documentation is referred to as freeze time.

However, this information does not appear to be exposed through either the Available Actions (A029) or Maintain Referral Letter (A012) endpoints.

Is this configuration or restriction available through any other endpoint?

Where possible, we would prefer to prevent the user from attempting the update when this service setting is in place and inform them up front, rather than allowing the action and then presenting a warning or error message. We would have expected this restriction to be reflected in the Available Actions response, but it does not appear to be exposed or returned by that API call.

Can you confirm whether this information is available elsewhere in the API, or whether the error response is currently the only way to determine that modifications are no longer permitted?

Hi Sean,

thanks for your query. The freeze time configuration is a per-service backend setting and is not currently exposed through any FHIR API endpoint.

A029 Available actions does not include “Maintain Referral Letter” among its supported actions, so it cannot be used to pre-check whether A012 will be permitted.

At present, the 422 unprocessable entity response from A012 is the only way to determine that a referral is within the freeze time period. We recommend handling this response to inform the user accordingly.

Hope this helps,

George

Thank you for your response