More funding for ADHD care in Wales: a £12 million investment
1 minute-summary: The Welsh Government has allocated an additional £12 million to “to support a new national improvement programme for neurodevelopmental conditions to 2025.” Building on earlier funding and studies in to neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD, the funding brings opportunities for digital transformation to improve clinical care and patient experience. A key aim will be to increase service availability, reduce wait times, and reduce costs of supporting children and adults with neurodevelopmental conditions.
Just days after implementing QbTest at a paediatric clinic in Wales, our team of Clinical Advisors received some excellent news. The Welsh Government had announced their allocation of an additional £12 million to “to support a new national improvement programme for neurodevelopmental conditions to 2025.”
The Welsh Government has experience with these types of forward-thinking initiatives. They’ve previously invested £11.5 million into improving autism services and were in fact the first country within the UK to publish an autism strategy, back in 2008. This new funding builds on the success and findings of that program to a wider array of neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD.
Looking ahead to 2023 and beyond, this new funding brings opportunities for digital transformation to improve clinical care and patient experience. Understanding how the funding works and its potential to improve outcomes is essential.
A new pathway in Wales
In their summary report reviewing the demand, capacity, and design of neurodevelopmental services in Wales, the Health and Social Services Research authors noted the key challenges for treating ADHD and related conditions in the area.
“Demand for diagnostic assessment has outstripped the capacity of both Children’s Neurodevelopmental (ND) services and the IAS [Integrated Autism Services], and it is expected to remain high. The fundamental problem has been the small size of services relative to demand, rather than issues and constraints in the diagnostic assessment process or the design and structure of ND services.”
The report goes on to further note that these demand-capacity gaps “…increase waiting times, delaying support (where support depends upon a diagnosis), increasing people’s distress and the risk that problems can multiply and/or escalate as opportunities to intervene early are missed.” Essentially, the new funding aims to increase the availability of services in order to better serve a wider population.
Making real change
While the report’s full findings are well worth a read, the fact is that practitioners in Wales have been aware of these challenges for some time. Decreasing wait times and reducing costs while improving outcomes for children and adults alike has long been a goal of clinicians in Wales and across the UK.
Luckily, practitioners in Wales can draw on the experiences of other parts of the UK. We’ve written before about how clinicians in Scotland leveraged a similar investment to improve outcomes in their practices.
Similarly, when clinics in East Midlands as part of the Real World Demonstrator lead by the Academic Health and Science Network incorporated QbTest into their practices to help diagnose or rule out ADHD, they gained some considerable improvements:
- Average time from assessment to diagnosis reduced by 153 days
- 20% clinical workforce time was released
- 33% cost reduction
- An ROI of £84,460
The new funding from the Welsh Government can allow for similar improvements in their country. Clinicians have the drive, and with the resources to make change possible, great things can happen for clinics and patients across Wales.
QbTest in your practice
QbTest is an FDA-cleared and CE-marked objective ADHD test which evaluates three core measures of ADHD. When implemented alongside clinical interviews and rating scales, this 15–20-minute test can help rule in or rule out ADHD more accurately than before, reducing delays to diagnostic decisions and improving service efficiency.
To learn more, book a call with one of our experts today to see how adding QbTest to your practice can help improve outcomes for patients and practitioners alike.