Prepositions After Clinical Verbs: referred to, commenced on, compliant with
The grammar errors that survive proofreading because the sentence still makes sense. Learn the four collocation groups that cover almost every clinical letter.
“She was referred for the cardiologist.” You understood that sentence perfectly. Nothing about it stopped you reading — which is exactly why this error survives your proofreading every time you write it.
Errors that break comprehension get caught. Errors that only sound slightly off to a native ear don’t, and prepositions after clinical verbs are the largest single family of those errors in an OET letter.
Why there’s no rule
These are collocations — fixed verb-preposition pairings English simply settled on. You cannot reason your way from admitted to admitted to, any more than a learner reasons their way to interested in. The honest approach isn’t logic; it’s learning the handful that actually appear in clinical writing.
The four groups
1. Referral: TO a person, FOR a thing
| Correct | Wrong |
|---|---|
| referred to the cardiologist | referred for the cardiologist |
| referred for an echocardiogram | referred to an echocardiogram |
Both at once: “I am referring her to the cardiology team for further assessment.”
2. Medication: ON a drug, TO a different one
| Correct | Wrong |
|---|---|
| commenced on metformin | commenced with metformin |
| started on insulin | started by insulin |
| switched to a different statin | switched with a different statin |
Commenced with sounds reasonable — it’s simply not the pairing English uses.
3. Admission: TO in, FROM out
| Correct | Wrong |
|---|---|
| admitted to the ward | admitted in the ward |
| transferred to the unit | transferred in the unit |
| discharged from hospital | discharged of hospital |
This is the one group where logic actually helps: movement into a place takes to; movement out of a place takes from.
4. Description: WITH, OF, FROM — and they don’t all match
| Correct | Wrong |
|---|---|
| compliant with medication | compliant to medication |
| diagnosed with diabetes | diagnosed of diabetes |
| presented with chest pain | presented by chest pain |
| suffering from depression | suffering of depression |
| complaining of pain | complaining about pain |
Suffering from and complaining of break the with pattern — which is exactly why they’re worth memorising specifically.
The opposite trap: adding a preposition that isn’t there
Some verbs take none at all:
- discuss it — not discuss about it
- request an appointment — not request for one
- attend the clinic — not attend to the clinic
- contact me — not contact with me
If your first language uses a preposition with the equivalent verb, this error is genuinely invisible to you, which is why it slips past your own proofreading and straight into your Language score.
How to actually learn these
Never learn the verb alone — learn the whole phrase, with a real object. Not refer — referred to the cardiologist for review. Not commence — commenced on metformin 500mg. You’re training a pattern, not memorising a definition, and patterns need their surrounding words to stick.
The honest limit
You cannot reliably proofread your own prepositions. If the wrong pairing sounded wrong to you, you wouldn’t have written it — your ear is the thing being tested, and it can’t check itself. This is genuinely the error type where an outside reader is worth the most. Our free OET Grammar Checker catches many of these automatically; for the ones that sound fine to you specifically, our OET writing correction service reads your letter the way an assessor would.
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