How to check your ICB's current position

Local rules differ and move, and no national list of them is reliable. Two checks give you the current answer: your integrated care board's own page and your GP practice.

The short version

Your integrated care board publishes its own ADHD position, and that page is the current answer.
Positions vary sharply between neighbouring areas and change within a financial year.
This site deliberately publishes no national list of which areas have restricted, because such a list goes stale silently.

The single most common question about this pathway is whether it is still open where the reader lives. It is also the one question a national site is worst placed to answer, and pretending otherwise is how out-of-date advice gets read as current.

Why no list is published here

There are more than forty integrated care boards in England, each publishing its own position, each able to change it inside a financial year. A table of those positions would be wrong in parts within weeks of being written, and would be most wrong exactly where it mattered most: for the reader whose area had just changed.

The variation is not subtle either. In the four ICB pages checked when this site was built, one had implemented activity plans while confirming referrals continue, one said plainly that it had not paused assessments but that waits were very long, one had asked adult providers to reduce new assessments for people waiting under 52 weeks, and one simply published a table of which providers were open for which service. Those are four genuinely different answers.

The two checks that work

If the two answers conflict, the practice is describing what it is doing and the ICB page is describing what it has commissioned. Both are worth knowing, and the conflict itself is useful information to raise.

Your integrated care board's own website. Search for your ICB name with ADHD or Right to Choose. What you are looking for is a page about ADHD services, a position statement, or a provider list. Note whether the page carries a last-updated date.
Your GP practice. Practices are told directly when a local pathway changes, and the receptionist or practice manager can usually say whether the practice is currently making Right to Choose referrals for ADHD.

What to ask for

Ask whether referrals are currently being made, whether a specific provider is within its activity plan for this financial year, and whether there is a support offer for people who are waiting. NHS England's advice says systems can implement a support offer to help patients live well with ADHD, which could include voluntary sector provision, peer support options, and comprehensive patient information and signposting, so it is a fair question to put.

If you are told a provider is closed to new bookings, ask whether other providers on the ICB's list are still open, since the answer is often provider-specific rather than pathway-wide.

Questions people ask about this

Is Right to Choose available where I live?

Only your own integrated care board and your GP practice can answer that today. Positions vary sharply between neighbouring areas and change inside a financial year, and any national list would be out of date in parts within weeks. Search for your ICB's name with ADHD or Right to Choose, and check whether the page carries a last-updated date.

What is an integrated care board?

It is the NHS body responsible for planning and commissioning health services for a geographic area in England. For this pathway it matters because the duty in regulation 39 falls on the commissioner, and because the activity plans that cap how many assessments a provider delivers are agreed between that board and each provider.