Last year we wrote about the scale of ADHD under-recognition in the UK — a problem the independent NHS England ADHD Taskforce has since put a number on: £17 billion a year. That figure comes from a straight forward comparison — adults with ADHD incur roughly £17,000 more per year in healthcare, education, employment and criminal justice costs than their own siblings without ADHD. Scaled across the population, it adds up to one of the most expensive gaps in UK healthcare.
The Taskforce report was clear about why the gap exists. It isn't that ADHD is rare in adults — prevalence sits at around 2–3%. It's that recognition is rare. Recorded diagnosis rates in English health records are just 0.74% in men and 0.20% in women. Most adults living with ADHD have never been formally assessed, and many won't be for years: current waiting times for adult ADHD assessment range from two to eight years, with some areas reporting lists of ten to fifteen.
Behind every one of those statistics is the same starting point: a person who suspects something isn't quite right, and doesn't know what to do about it.
The problem isn't just the waiting list — it's the doorway
Long waits get most of the attention, understandably. But the Taskforce also flagged something that gets talked about less: the difficulty of the first step. GPs report insufficient time, limited ADHD-specific training, and no consistent structure for what an initial conversation about possible ADHD should even cover. Patients, meanwhile, often arrive with a vague sense that "something's off" — trouble focusing, chronic disorganisation, restlessness, impulsivity — but no easy way to turn that into the kind of structured information a referral pathway actually needs.
This is exactly the gap the Taskforce pointed to when it noted that ADHD assessment tools "rely on standardised questions about behaviours and experiences, which can easily be digitised and administered through secure platforms" — and that this digitisation doesn't require a psychiatrist to administer, only appropriate clinical oversight of what happens next. Screening and diagnosis are not the same thing, and conflating them is part of what has kept the specialist bottleneck so severe. Getting the screening step right, and getting it into primary care and self-referral pathways at scale, is one of the few genuinely tractable parts of this problem.
What we've built
The Plan A Health Adult ADHD Screening Assessment is our attempt at solving that first-step problem directly.
It's a free online tool that takes around 10–15 minutes to complete, and it uses the same clinically recognised instruments healthcare professionals already rely on:
- ASRS (Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale) — the World Health Organization's screening tool for adult ADHD, covering both the core screener and the fuller symptom profile
- GAD-7 — a widely validated measure of anxiety
- PHQ-9 — a widely validated measure of low mood and depression
We've included GAD-7 and PHQ-9 deliberately. The Taskforce report was explicit that ADHD "co-occurrence with common mental health problems is extremely frequent, "and that anxiety or depression are often what gets diagnosed and treated while the underlying ADHD goes unrecognised — a pattern the report notes is especially common among women and people from socially disadvantaged or minority groups. A tool that only screens for ADHD risks reproducing that same blind spot. Ours looks at the fuller picture in one pass: current symptoms, mood, anxiety, medication history, and relevant family history.
What happens after the assessment
Scores and their interpretation are shown instantly, at no cost — that part is free, full stop.
If the results suggest further assessment would be worthwhile, there's an option to purchase a professional PDF report: a formal referral letter addressed to your GP, with your scores, clinical interpretations and background history laid out clearly, sent straight to your inbox. It also includes information on the NHS Right to Choose, which can open the door to a faster assessment through an alternative NHS-commissioned provider — genuinely useful given the waiting times above.
And if your scores come back below the screening threshold, the tool says so plainly. You only pay for a report when it's actually likely to be useful to you. We think that matters — a screening tool that's financially incentivised to tell everyone they need a referral isn't a screening tool, it's a sales funnel.
Your answers stay in your own browser and aren't stored on a server without your consent. The assessment is GDPR-compliant, accessible, and works on any device.
What this doesn't do
Worth saying plainly: this is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. Only a qualified clinician can diagnose ADHD, and the Taskforce report is unambiguous that "a clinical diagnosis of ADHD requires a full and thorough clinical assessment and cannot be defined on the basis of questionnaires alone." Nothing here replaces that.
What it does is remove the blank-page problem. Instead of walking into a GP appointment trying to explain a decade of scattered symptoms from memory, you walk in with structured, validated scores and a clear starting point for the conversation. That's a small thing operationally and a large thing practically — it's often the difference between a conversation that goes somewhere and one that gets deferred to "let's keep an eye on it."
Why this matters at scale
The Taskforce's own research suggests that even modest reductions in diagnostic delay translate into real economic benefit — each year of delay is estimated to cost £4,500–£8,000 per person in lost productivity, and a 20% reduction in ADHD-related productivity losses nationally could be worth £4.6–7.2 billion a year. None of that requires solving the specialist capacity crisis overnight. It requires more people reaching the right starting point, sooner, with better information in hand when they get there.
That's a modest claim for one online tool to make, and we're making it deliberately modest. We're not proposing to replace clinicians, shortcut proper assessment, or diagnose anyone through a questionnaire. We're proposing to fix the part of the pathway that's currently just... missing — the bit between "I think something might be going on" and "I have a structured way to raise this with my GP."
If you've been putting off that conversation, the free screening is here: plana.health/adult-adhd-screening-tool
