Help centre
Consent and messaging
Which messages need which consent, where consent is recorded, what happens to a send when it is missing, and how a patient withdraws.
The two consents, and why they are not one
Orla distinguishes transactional consent from marketing consent, and it will not let one stand in for the other.
- Transactional covers messages that are part of the care the patient asked for: an appointment reminder, a confirmation, a waitlist offer for a slot they are waiting on.
- Marketing covers everything else: a recall campaign, a newsletter, a review request.
A patient who wants reminders has not thereby agreed to be marketed at, and treating those as one switch is the single most common way a clinic ends up with a complaint.
The template decides, not the sender
Which consent a message needs is decided by the template, in one place in the system, rather than by whoever writes the send.
This matters more than it sounds. If each caller had to remember to declare "this one is marketing", then a new marketing template added six months later would go out under reminder consent, and nobody would notice until a patient did. Because the mapping lives with the templates, a new marketing template inherits the marketing rule automatically.
What happens when consent is missing
The send is refused, and the reason is recorded on the patient's message thread — not silently dropped, and not sent anyway.
So when somebody at the desk asks "why didn't Mary get her reminder", the thread answers: no consent, or held for quiet hours, or no mobile number on the record. Each of those has a different fix, and knowing which is the difference between fixing it and guessing.
Quiet hours
Noisy channels — SMS, WhatsApp, voice — are held during the clinic's quiet hours, and the thread records when the message will go instead. Email is not gated this way, because an email does not wake anybody.
One exception, on purpose: a waitlist offer lives for about 30 minutes. If it were held until morning, the appointment it offers would already have passed. So waitlist offers are allowed through the quiet-hours gate.
They are not allowed through the consent gate. Urgency justifies an awkward hour; it never justifies messaging somebody who said no.
How a patient withdraws
Two ways, both immediate:
- They text STOP. Consent is withdrawn and the acknowledgement is sent — which is the one message that deliberately bypasses the consent check, because a regulator requires the confirmation precisely at the moment consent is gone.
- They toggle it in the patient portal, on the same screen as their own contact details.
Either way it takes effect on the next send. Nothing queued goes out under a consent that has been withdrawn.
Where to see what a patient agreed to
On the patient's record: every consent, its type, when it was granted and when it was revoked, against the wording that was in force at the time. It is also in the patient's data export, so a subject access request answers the consent question without anybody assembling it by hand.