>i did try the 'order by patients.name' (and p.name) and both situations
>report no column of this name, so no fix yet!

By the way, I think I can guess why it doesn't let you use order by name
successfully. The order by refers to the result set, and you cannot have
two fields with the same name. When it chooses the wrong one to be named
NAME, the other one gets a different name. Maybe

select p.unique_id, p.name as sortname, s.additional_info, s.name
from patients p
left outer join patientstatus s on (p.unique_id=s.unique_id)
order by sortname

or

select p.unique_id, p.name as sortname, s.additional_info
from patients p
left outer join patientstatus s on (p.unique_id=s.unique_id)
order by name

will work? (the second option simply avoids selecting the name from
patientstatus)

Set