ADHD Policy 

How to get a referral and when we will ‘share care’ and prescribe medication

If you are wondering if you have ADHD, we can refer you for an assessment. We can refer you on the NHS locally, via NHS ‘right to choose’ or privately. The current wait to be assessed by the local mental health team is over 2 years. Please read the information below carefully.

In order for medication to be safely prescribed for ADHD, you need to be under the care of a psychiatrist and your GP. This is known as ‘shared care’.   

We will enter into shared care with our local mental health team, and prescribe medication initiated by them, once you are stable on a suitable dose.

In order to share care with a private or ‘right to choose’ clinics and prescribe medication, we require that the diagnosis of ADHD is made by a consultant psychiatrist based in the UK who specialises in ADHD. This means that the actual assessment needs to be conducted by a consultant psychiatrist, not that there is a consultant psychiatrist overseeing assessments made by other professionals. 

If you opt to have your ADHD assessment through the NHS ‘right to choose’ pathway or privately and a diagnosis of ADHD is made by another professional who is not a consultant psychiatrist based in the UK who specialises in ADHD, we will not be able to enter into shared care with that organisation and so we will not be able to prescribe the medication. It is your responsibility to check if the ‘right to choose’ or private provider assessments are carried out by a consultant psychiatrist or not. Our secretaries are not able to provide this information. It is also essential that the provider continues to look after you after diagnosis, offers annual (at a minimum) medication reviews and doesn’t discharge you.  

If you have moved to Cambridge from outside the UK with a diagnosis of ADHD and on medication, we would also require that you were under the care of a UK based consultant psychiatrist who specialises in ADHD for us to share your care with before we would be able to prescribe your medication. You will need a referral to a UK psychiatrist, either on the NHS or privately. Please note that the wait for the local NHS mental health team is over 2 years and if you need medication within the next few months, you will either need to source this from your doctor outside the UK or look into seeing a psychiatrist privately. 

Once the diagnosis has been made (please see above for requirements around diagnosis) we will take over the prescribing of ADHD medication when it has been initiated and you are stable on it. Initial prescriptions and the titrating up of the dose, as well as the physical health checks associated with the dose increases would all need to be done by the clinic but once you are stable and established on a dose, we would take over the prescriptions. We would need the clinic to formally write to us requesting this at this point and specifying the dose, follow up and monitoring requirements. Once established on the medication we would also be able to do the physical health checks (usually weight, pulse and blood pressure) here that would usually be done a minimum of 6 monthly. We would require you to attend, no less frequently than annually, for reviews of the medication with the ADHD team. We would not be able to continue prescribing medication if you did not have annual reviews with the psychiatry team looking after you. 

If you would like to be referred on the NHS locally please contact us via the website and we will send you the questionnaire and form for you to complete. 

If you would like to be referred to an NHS ‘right to choose’ provider, please go onto the website of that provider, download and complete the relevant forms/questionnaires (these vary from provider to provider) and send them in through the website for us to send off. 

If you would like a private assessment, it is likely that you do not need a referral from us at all.