Government summit to tackle ADHD crisis - Alex Cole-Hamilton
It’s hard to believe that exactly six years ago this week, hospitals in Wuhan, China started to receive patients suffering from an unknown respiratory illness that would come to define this decade.
The pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it forced us to stay at home and with that came a great awakening in people who, struggling to cope with the stillness, realised that perhaps they were wired slightly differently.
Since the release of Covid restrictions a tidal wave of people have come forward with an understanding that they may be neurodivergent. In some parts of Scotland, referrals for ADHD diagnosis in adult patients skyrocketed by over 1000 per cent in the months after the final Covid lockdown.
That surge in demand has been replicated the world over and was compounded by a global shortage in ADHD medication, caused in part by Chinese lockdowns which reduced some pharmaceutical production. This in turn saw the temporary closure of NHS titration clinics, which help patients to find the correct dose of ADHD medication for them.
The upshot of all of this is that anyone presenting at their local GP with suspected neurodiversity like ADHD can expect to wait several years before they are even assessed. That means a child coming forward at the age of 11 could have to face life qualifying exams without the necessary psychological or pharmaceutical support.
Of all the health issues that people come to me for assistance with, accessing a diagnosis for ADHD and other neurodiversities is by far the most common thing they raise.
Early this year I used a Scottish Liberal Democrat debate slot to raise this crisis in parliament. During that debate the Minister for Mental Wellbeing agreed, at my insistence, to convene a summit to address the ocean of unmet need.
This summit met on Monday. Sometimes Scottish Government meetings of this ilk can be nothing more than talking shops, but my sense of this meeting was that for once the government had got exactly the right people round the table.
Over several hours we talked about the clinical realities of the surge in demand on the ground. We looked at why GP practices across Scotland were ending the practice of ‘shared care’ whereby patients used to be able to obtain an NHS prescription for ADHD meds after receiving a diagnosis from a private provider.
In large part this is down to the fact that due to a proliferation in private providers and some shonky ones at that, GPs cannot verify the safety of the diagnostic process being undertaken.
At the meeting we looked at proposals like a quality assurance kitemark for private practitioners to allow ‘shared care’ to commence again.
We also discussed a plan to deal with the backlog in cases as well as support in education and the workplace and how we could make these environments more accessible to neurodivergent people.
Covid didn’t cause this surge in neurodiversity, it just awakened an understanding in people as to who they had always been and that they didn’t have to continue on without support and recognition.
The group will meet again in the New Year. I’m determined to keep it focused on solutionsbecause Scottish Liberal Democrats will always be Scotland's party of mental health.