Discussed WITH the Patient, Not Discussed TO

Discuss is one of the most frequent verbs in an OET letter — clinicians discuss diagnoses, discuss treatment options, discuss discharge plans, discuss test results — and it’s also one of the most reliably mishandled, because the preposition rule that governs it doesn’t match the verbs it sits next to in every other sentence. Writing “discussed the results to the patient” instead of “discussed the results with the patient” is a Language-criterion error that survives proofreading precisely because it sounds like it should be right.

Watch the full breakdown: Discussed WITH, Not Discussed TO works through the pattern using real OET-style case-note sentences.

Why does “discussed to” happen so often in OET writing?

The error isn’t random — it’s borrowed from other verbs that genuinely do take “to” before a person. Look at how close their patterns sit to discuss’s:

• Explain: “I explained the results to the patient.” Correct — explain takes “to” before a person.
• Talk: “I talked to the patient about her medication.” Correct — talk takes “to” before a person, and “about” before the topic.
• Speak: “I spoke to the family about the prognosis.” Correct — the same “to” plus “about” pattern.
• Discuss: “I discussed the medication with the patient.” The odd one out — “with,” never “to,” and no “about” before the topic at all.

Four verbs a candidate reaches for constantly in the same sentence position, and three of them take “to.” The fourth breaks the pattern, and under exam pressure, most candidates never notice the break — they write discuss the way they’d write explain, talk, or speak, because that’s the rule their hand has already learned from the other three.

The core rule: discussed with the patient, never discussed to

Discuss is a transitive verb that already means “talk about” — the topic is its direct object, so nothing sits between discuss and the topic. If you also want to name who you spoke to, “with” introduces that person, and it always comes after the topic, not before it.

That single row of the table predicts every correct sentence you’ll write with discuss in a clinical letter.

Worked clinical examples: the two errors, corrected

Case notes compress everything into shorthand, which is exactly where candidates reach for the wrong preposition once they expand a fragment into a full sentence.

Every row in the “common error” column fails for one of the two reasons above: either “to” has replaced “with” before a person, or “about” has been wrongly inserted before the topic. Neither error changes what the sentence means — a reader still understands exactly what happened — which is precisely why both slip past a candidate’s own proofreading.

Does “discussed to” actually sound wrong, or just informal?

It sounds wrong, not just casual — and that distinction matters for how examiners read it. Plenty of register slips in OET letters are a matter of formality: a candidate writes “I told her” instead of the more clinical “she was advised,” and the sentence is grammatically fine, just pitched at the wrong level of professional distance. “Discussed to the patient” isn’t that kind of error. There’s no informal register, spoken or written, where a native speaker says “discuss to” — it isn’t a casual version of the correct phrase, it’s a different, incorrect preposition attached to a verb that never takes it. That’s what makes it a Language error rather than a Genre & Style one: the sentence isn’t too informal, it’s ungrammatical.

This is worth being precise about because the fix is different depending on which problem you have. A register slip is corrected by choosing a more clinical synonym or restructuring the sentence to sound more formal. A fixed-collocation error like “discussed to” has exactly one correct form — “discussed with” — and no amount of rephrasing around it fixes the underlying mistake if the wrong preposition is still there. Once you know discuss takes “with” and only “with” before a person, there’s nothing left to judge case by case; the rule applies identically whether you’re writing to a GP, a specialist, a patient, or a patient’s family.

What criterion does this fall under, and why does it matter?

This is a Language-criterion error under the OET writing marking scheme, which sets out six official criteria: Purpose, Content, Conciseness & Clarity, Genre & Style, Organisation & Layout, and Language. Language scores grammatical range and control, and a fixed collocation used against its own rule — discuss paired with “to” instead of “with” — is graded as a control error even though the sentence’s meaning is never genuinely in doubt.

Because discuss is one of the highest-frequency verbs in referral, discharge, and progress letters, this isn’t a one-off risk. A candidate who has the preposition wrong tends to write “discussed… to” or “discussed about” more than once in the same letter, and examiners marking Language read for exactly that kind of repeated pattern rather than an isolated slip. Getting a single high-frequency collocation right protects marks across the whole script, not just in one sentence.

How do I catch this in my own writing before I submit?

Search your draft for every instance of “discussed.” Look at the word immediately after it:

• If it’s “to” and a person follows, change it to “with.”
• If it’s “about” and the topic follows, delete “about” — the topic should sit directly after discuss with nothing in between.
• If it’s already “with” followed by a person, or the topic sits directly after discuss with no person named, it’s correct as written.

This takes under a minute per letter and resolves both errors in one pass, without needing to name the grammar behind either one.

Related preposition traps worth fixing at the same time

Discuss isn’t the only clinical verb with a fixed, non-obvious preposition. Our broader guide to prepositions after clinical verbs covers referral (to a person, for a service), medication (on a drug), and admission (to/from) collocations that follow the same “learn the whole phrase, not the verb alone” logic as discuss. If diagnosis-related prepositions are tripping you up too, Diagnosed WITH vs Diagnosed AS vs Presenting WITH works through three more fixed patterns in the same family of errors. For the wider set of grammar issues that most often cost Language marks, see our OET writing grammar guide, and for the criterion this all falls under, our Language criterion breakdown explains exactly how grammatical control is weighted at each band. For a fast first check on a specific letter, our free OET Grammar Checker will flag many discuss/with/to mismatches automatically.

Why this is worth fixing as a habit

Discuss shows up in nearly every letter type OET Writing tests — referral, discharge, transfer, and advice letters all involve a clinician discussing something with a patient, family member, or colleague — so getting the collocation wrong isn’t a rare risk, it’s a repeated one across a single script. Fixing it is also one of the cheapest wins available under Language: it’s a fixed rule with no exceptions to memorise beyond “with before a person, nothing before the topic,” and once it’s corrected, it stays corrected in every letter you write afterward. Our OET correction packages check fixed-collocation errors like this across a full letter alongside the other five criteria, so a repeated discuss-with-to slip gets caught and corrected before it costs you a band.