Data submissions from February 2025 onwards
Data submissions from February 2025 onwards are not directly comparable to previous months due to new submissions from independent providers that have resulted in an increase in the number of open referrals.
4 December 2025 13:00 PM
Data Quality
A patient with ADHD may have multiple diagnosis and medication codes recorded on their patient record. For measuring prevalence the most recent ADHD diagnosis date is used. The first date of a recorded ADHD diagnosis is used when looking at medication prescribing. Therefore, a patient may appear earlier in the medication prescribing analysis (Figures 4 and 5) than in the overall prevalence analysis (Figures 2 and 3). The most recent diagnosis date was used for prevalence calculations to allow comparisons with other pre-existing ADHD data. The first recorded date of an ADHD diagnosis was used when analysing ADHD medication prescribing to demonstrate the start of the patient pathway.
Any patient with an ADHD remission code on their GP patient record is excluded from prevalence calculations. The list of remission code can be found in Appendix 2. Fewer than 10 SNOMED remission codes were used in primary care from 2023 to 2024 . Although this might suggest data quality issues in recording when a patient’s ADHD goes into remission, true remission of ADHD is rare. Any possibility of overcounting patients whose ADHD is in remission is minimised by using the latest ADHD diagnosis date to reduce the chance of the patient being in remission at the point of reporting.
It is not possible to link the purpose of a prescribed medication to the diagnosis of a specific condition within the data. For example, Methylphenidate is licenced for ADHD and narcolepsy . Therefore, it is possible for a patient with ADHD to be prescribed medication for a separate condition but be counted as taking the medication to treat their ADHD. This risk is minimised by selecting the first date the ADHD medication was prescribed following the date the first ADHD diagnosis was recorded. In addition, the prevalence of patients taking ADHD medication without an ADHD diagnosis was calculated. Some patients in these counts could have ADHD but their diagnosis was not recorded, others may be taking ADHD medication for another condition.
Last edited: 4 December 2025 1:13 pm