If you suspect your child may have ADHD and would like to arrange assessment, this can be arranged on the NHS by contacting your child’s school or nursery. They can refer your child for an assessment, and the mental health services have stated that this should be the route of referral, rather than your child being referred by a GP.
Please do not book a GP appointment. If your child’s teacher has suggested you should, please ask to speak to the school’s SENCO (special educational needs coordinator) who will advise further.
Please note: schools and other services should be putting in place adjustments for the child to address their needs, regardless of whether or not a diagnosis has been made yet (including needs for possible ADHD and/or autism).
It is regrettable that waiting times for NHS ADHD assessment are extremely long. You may decide to pay privately for assessment.
Please be advised that we cannot usually ‘share care’ or take over prescribing from a private specialist, so prescriptions are likely to need to continue to come from the specialist until/unless your child is seen in the NHS.
If you or your child is nearly 18 and we are prescribing your/their ADHD medication, please navigate to our adult ADHD webpage and read section 4 about ensuring we can continue the prescription.
Right to Choose referrals
The local health board (ICB) strongly recommends waiting for local CAMHS assessment rather than proceeding with Right to Choose (RtC) referral for ADHD assessment in children for the following reasons:
- Quality of providers can vary, and the health board is not responsible for ensuring quality of RtC providers.
- RtC providers are usually more limited in their assessments. The local CAMHS clinic will screen for both ASD and ADHD at the same time (children may have signs of ADHD, but go on to be diagnosed with autism or both). RtC will generally not do this dual assessment, and/or may require a second referral (and further waiting) if signs of autism are found at the ADHD assessment.
- RtC referrals must be done by a GP, which is problematic because the GP usually does not know the child well; referral to the local CAMHS service is done by the schools who know the child best.
- GPs are not usually able to share care with RtC providers, due to concerns about quality of service, and/or the fact that many RtC providers do not commit to the 6 monthly monitoring checks required by national guidelines. This means prescriptions would need to continue to come from the RtC provider, and in some cases the RtC provider will not be willing to start ADHD medication without an agreement to hand prescribing over to the GP. In this case, the child would have to be referred back to CAMHS before medication could start, and would go back on the CAMHS waiting list at the back of the queue.
If you accept these potential issues, and would still like to be referred under RtC, please provide a written summary from the school detailing your child’s problems. If the child has already been referred to CAMHS, please provide us with the referral that was sent – this will contain all the important detail. Send these details to us via email (mrhc.generaladmin@nhs.net), or you can drop in a paper copy to reception. We will then process the referral.
Please note that patients cannot be on two NHS waiting lists for the same problem, so if your child is currently on the waiting list for CAMHS, this will be cancelled when the RtC referral is made.