Cost of the Queue: ADHD Waiting-Delay Burden Model
A tool that calculates how much money is lost by the government when adults have to wait too long for ADHD care.
A health-economics modeling service that converts a local adult ADHD waiting list into a monetized cost of delay across health, social care, and criminal justice budgets — packaged as the investment-case annex for funding more assessment capacity.
Concept
A modeling service that takes a service's actual adult ADHD waiting list — size, average delay, local population — and outputs a monetized "cost of the queue": incremental health-service usage, social care and employment-support costs, and criminal justice contact attributable to delayed treatment. The deliverable is an investment-case annex (per integrated care board, trust, or region) that funders can drop into business cases, showing what doing nothing costs across budgets versus the cost of funding more assessment capacity. The single wedge is converting waiting time — currently an anecdote — into a cross-budget fiscal number, addressing the paper's stated constraint that every solution hinges on fiscal capacity.
Why now
The new analysis [0] states that treatment delays "carry a human and financial cost, imposing a burden on health, social care and the criminal justice system," and that the success of every proposed solution "hinges on fiscal capacity and workforce issues" — while quantifying the delays themselves (waits quoted up to roughly 4 years, with 5–10 years realistic for newly referred patients where demand stays static and funding is unchanged). Adult ADHD epidemiology supplies the model's denominators: roughly 2.5% worldwide adult prevalence and up to 70% of childhood-onset cases continuing to experience impairing symptoms as adults [2], with 18 years of UK primary-care diagnosis and prescription trends available to parameterize local projections [4]. The paper's own conclusion — that a rethink of procurement and delivery is needed — makes the fiscal case the binding constraint this product directly serves.
Written by GLM · 11 Oct 2026
AI assessment
A high-utility B2G consulting tool that transforms clinical waiting lists into fiscal arguments for funding, directly addressing the 'fiscal capacity' bottleneck identified in the research.
- Evidence strength 4/5
- The idea directly leverages the research's claim that delays impose financial burdens on health, social care, and justice systems, and uses the provided prevalence and trend data to parameterize the model.
- Market pull 4/5
- Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and NHS trusts have a high urgency to secure funding, and a monetized 'cost of inaction' is the standard language required for successful business cases.
- Novelty & moat 3/5
- While it shares a domain with the 'Demand Forecaster' and 'Waitlist Watch', it shifts the value proposition from data collection/forecasting to financial advocacy and budget-cross-pollination.
- Feasibility 5/5
- The MVP is a health-economics model (likely a spreadsheet or simple software tool) based on existing epidemiological data and cost-per-event metrics, requiring no new clinical trials.
- Wedge clarity 5/5
- The wedge is extremely sharp: providing a specific 'investment-case annex' that commissioners can drop directly into funding requests.
- Simplicity / focus 5/5
- The product is focused on a single output (the cost-of-delay model) rather than attempting to build a broad healthcare platform.
Scored by Gemma 4 · 11 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.
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Who benefits
- Centre for Mental Healthorganization
UK charity specializing in economic analyses of mental health policy; a ready-made delay-cost model extends its costing work to ADHD waiting lists with locally credible numbers.
- ADHD UKorganization
Needs quantified, cross-system cost arguments to press funders for adult ADHD capacity; the model converts its anecdotal patient cases into fiscal evidence.
- NHS Englandorganization
Business cases for new or expanded adult ADHD services require cost-offset evidence spanning justice and social care budgets, which is exactly what this model produces.
- Criminal Justice Allianceorganization
A coalition focused on reducing reoffending; evidence that untreated ADHD delays push costs into policing and prisons supports its case for health-led early intervention.
Research it builds on
- Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD ) in adults: evidence base, uncertainties and controversiesSamuele Cortese, Mark A. Bellgrove, Isabell Brikell et al. · 2025 · 66 citationsAll ideas from this paper →
- UK adult ADHD services in crisisMichael Smith, Raja Mukherjee, Ulrich Müller-Sedgwick et al. · 2023 · 44 citationsAll ideas from this paper →
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses and prescriptions in UK primary care, 2000–2018: population-based cohort studyAlexandra Philipsen · 2024 · 2 citationsAll ideas from this paper →