Waitlist Watch: National Adult ADHD Waiting-Time Registry
A public registry that tracks and compares ADHD waiting times across different healthcare providers.
A data service that routinely collects and publishes comparable adult ADHD assessment waiting times for every NHS and independent UK provider — via scheduled FOI requests, voluntary submissions, and patient-reported updates — giving patients, charities, and commissioners the national dataset the system currently doesn't collect.
Concept
A subscription data service that builds the one dataset the UK adult ADHD system demonstrably lacks: routinely collected, comparable waiting times. It combines scheduled Freedom-of-Information requests to every NHS trust, voluntary submissions from participating services, and patient-reported updates into a live registry of adult ADHD assessment waits, benchmarked by provider and region. Outputs are a public-facing provider comparison for patients and charities, and commissioner-grade benchmark tables showing where queues are shortest, longest, and moving. The single wedge is measurement and accountability — the source analysis itself states that no routinely collected national data or national ADHD waiting-time targets exist.
Why now
The new analysis [0] found waiting times varying from 4 weeks to nearly 4 years across services (from 2018 FOI requests to clinical commissioning groups) and explicitly lists the "lack of routinely collected national data" and "absence of specific national targets for ADHD waiting times" as limitations — a registry is the direct product answer to both gaps. Corpus evidence confirms the pressure is structural rather than transient: specialist supply has not kept pace with assessment demand under financial pressure [1], and UK primary-care diagnoses and prescriptions rose across 2000–2018 [4], meaning the queues being measured are long-lived and worth benchmarking continuously.
Written by GLM · 11 Oct 2026
AI assessment
A high-utility data play that solves a documented systemic blind spot in the UK health system with a low-technical-barrier execution strategy.
- Evidence strength 5/5
- The idea directly addresses the 'lack of routinely collected national data' explicitly cited as a limitation in the provided research text.
- Market pull 4/5
- Strong pull from patient advocacy groups and commissioners who need benchmarking to drive funding and resource allocation in a crisis-level system.
- Novelty & moat 4/5
- While other catalog ideas focus on forecasting or triage, this is the first to focus on the actual measurement and transparency of the current queue.
- Feasibility 5/5
- The MVP requires no complex ML or clinical trials, only a structured process of FOI requests and a simple database/frontend.
- Wedge clarity 5/5
- The wedge is extremely sharp: providing the first comparable national dataset for a specific, high-demand clinical pathway.
- Simplicity / focus 5/5
- It is a single-purpose data service with a clear value proposition, avoiding the 'platform' trap.
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
- ADHD UKorganization
Publishes provider information for patients; a live waiting-time registry gives it comparable national data for advocacy and for pointing patients toward the shortest legitimate waits.
- NHS Englandorganization
Lacks routinely collected national ADHD waiting data (per the source analysis); a registry supplies the accountability layer and evidence base needed for target-setting and procurement decisions.
- UK Adult ADHD Network (UKAAN)organization
The professional network for adult ADHD services; benchmark data lets it define and audit service standards against measured peers rather than anecdote.
- Healthwatch Englandorganization
Signposting patients to services is core to its remit; comparable local waiting times are exactly the kind of decision-support data it publishes.
- Clinical Partnerscompany
An independent provider that can demonstrate materially shorter waits than NHS queues; verified benchmark data turns its speed into an evidence-backed differentiator.
Research it builds on
- UK adult ADHD services in crisisMichael Smith, Raja Mukherjee, Ulrich Müller-Sedgwick et al. · 2023 · 44 citationsAll ideas from this paper →
- Automatic Diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Using Machine LearningTianhua Chen, Grigoris Antoniou, Marios Adamou et al. · 2021 · 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 →