About ADHD Choice
ADHD Choice explains one narrow thing carefully: the NHS Right to Choose pathway for an ADHD assessment in England, including the parts of it that are usually left out.
Who writes it
It is written and maintained by the ADHD Choice editorial team. Nobody here is a clinician, and no page is presented as clinical advice or as a diagnosis. What the team does is read primary sources, quote them accurately, and mark the places where a source does not exist.
ADHD Choice is an independent information site. It is not the NHS, not an integrated care board and not an assessment provider, and it has no affiliation with any of them. It cannot make, arrange or speed up a referral. Only a GP can refer you under Right to Choose. Nothing here is medical advice or a diagnosis.
How a figure gets onto a page
Every number, date and quotation on this site was read out of the source page itself and recorded before it was written into any page, with the URL and the date it was checked. If a claim could not be traced to a primary source, it was cut rather than softened.
That rule removed things a reader might expect to find. There is no national count of people waiting for an ADHD assessment here. The widely circulated figure could not be traced past commercial clinic pages to a primary source, and the publication that would settle it, NHS England Digital's ADHD Management Information, was blocked by a bot check on every attempt made from here. That publication is real, and the most recent edition this site could see listed is dated August 2026, so the site names it and links it rather than telling you nothing exists. How often it comes out is not stated here either, for the same reason: nobody here has opened it. Not being able to read something is a fact about this site; it is not a fact about the world, and the two are easy to confuse. There are no provider waiting times, because none was captured as a dated figure and every one of them moves. There is nothing about the pathways in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, because the sources that would support it could not be read either. In each case the site says so on the relevant page instead of estimating.
The sources this site uses
- The regulations themselves, on legislation.gov.uk, for what the duty is.
- NHS England publications, including the independent ADHD taskforce report and the October 2025 advice to systems.
- nhs.uk, for the NHS's own consumer wording on choice, waiting times and prescription charges.
- Integrated care board pages, for what is actually happening locally, always with the ICB named.
- NICE guideline NG87, for who may diagnose ADHD and what an assessment must cover.
- Providers' own pages, for what each provider says about its own service, quoted and attributed.
Every page lists the sources it was built from, under the heading Where this came from, with the links going straight to the source rather than to a summary of it.
What this site will not publish
- Any promise about how long you will wait, or any claim that this pathway is the faster route.
- Any suggestion that a GP must accept a referral request, or that this site can obtain, arrange or speed one up.
- Any national list of which areas have restricted referrals, because such a list is wrong within weeks.
- Any figure that could not be traced to a primary source, however widely it is repeated.
- Any screening tool presented as a diagnosis, or any ranking of providers.
How it is funded, and what that means
ADHD Choice is independent of the NHS and of every provider named on it. Where a provider is discussed, it is because it publishes a Right to Choose service and says something specific about it, not because of any arrangement. No provider pays for placement and none is ranked or recommended.
Telling us something is wrong
Sources change, and an integrated care board can move its position in a week. If a quotation here no longer matches the page it came from, or a figure has been updated, email team@adhdchoice.co.uk with the page and what you found. Corrections to sourced material are made against the source, not against a recollection of it.