Why session notes cannot be edited, and how amendments work

At a Glance

A saved session note can never be changed, by you or by anyone else, and corrections are added as dated amendments that sit alongside the original.

This is deliberate

There is no edit button on a session note. There is no delete button either. This is the design working as intended, not something missing or broken.

A clinical record earns its weight from being contemporaneous. Its value, if it is ever read by a professional body, an insurer, a court, or the client themselves, comes from being what you wrote at the time, not what you would prefer to have written afterwards. A record that can be quietly revised is a record that proves very little.

So TherapyLock locks a note the moment you save it. The lock is not a setting and it is not a permission, and support cannot lift it. It is enforced in the database itself, which means it holds even against us.

What you can always do is add to the record. Nothing is lost, nothing is hidden, and anyone reading the file later sees both what you wrote first and what you added, each with its own date.

Adding an amendment

1. Open the client's record and find the note under Session Notes.

1. Click Add amendment.

1. TherapyLock reminds you what is about to happen: "The original note cannot be changed. Your amendment is saved separately with today's date and appears alongside the note in any export or access request."

1. Write what you are adding or correcting, and why. The prompt asks for both, and the second half matters. "Client's employer named incorrectly, corrected below" tells a future reader far more than the correction on its own.

1. Click Save amendment.

TherapyLock confirms with "Amendment added. The original note is unchanged."

How amendments appear afterwards

Amendments stack beneath the note in the order you wrote them, labelled Amendment 1, Amendment 2 and so on, each stamped with the date and time it was added.

They travel with the note. Export the client's record, or produce it for a subject access request, and the amendments come too, sitting alongside the original exactly as they do on screen.

Amendments follow the same rule as notes: once saved, an amendment cannot be edited or deleted either. If you get an amendment wrong, add another.

The one thing you can change

The session number is editable, because it is a piece of filing rather than a piece of clinical content.

Click the session number next to the note's date, type the right number, and press Enter or click Save. The note text is untouched; only the number changes. This is useful when you are bringing an existing practice across and a client's sessions began long before TherapyLock did.

Everything else in the note is fixed: the content, the session date, the duration, the template and the session mode.

What the counter at the top is counting

The session count shown at the top of the client record works from notes you have already saved. It takes the highest saved session number and suggests the next one up.

So while you are part way through writing a note, the counter has not caught up with you. Type 7 into the session number box on a client whose highest saved note is 3, and the top still reads "next is 4" until you save. Then it catches up.

Nothing has gone wrong when that happens, and no notes have been lost. If the numbering does end up out of sequence, usually when you are entering your own running totals from before TherapyLock, correct it on the note itself using the session number label above.

If something's not right

• You cannot find the edit button. There isn't one, and there is nothing wrong with your account. Use Add amendment instead.

• You wrote the note against the wrong client. An amendment cannot move it. Write an amendment on the original saying where the content belongs, then write the session up properly on the correct client's record. Both records then tell the truth about what happened, which is the outcome you want if either is ever read.

• You wrote the note against the wrong date. The session date is part of the locked record. Add an amendment giving the correct date.

• "Nothing to add" appears if you click save with an empty amendment box.

• You want a note removed entirely. Individual notes cannot be deleted. Deleting the whole client record does remove them, and that is a permanent step with its own process. Speak to us before going that way.

Related articles

• The client record

• Recording attendance and what happens after a session

• Bringing an existing practice into TherapyLock

Still Need Help?

If you have any other questions about TherapyLock, our support team is here to help.

Email us at support@counsellingtutor.com and we will be happy to assist.