Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve the diagnostic rates of ADHD in adult women.

Local commissioners are responsible for ensuring appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of the local population. Integrated care boards and National Health Service trusts should have due regard to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guideline ‘Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: diagnosis and management’.

This guideline aims to improve the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), recognising that ADHD may be under-diagnosed in women and girls and to improve the quality of care and support that people of all ages receive. Diagnosis of ADHD may be undertaken in a variety of care settings and therefore there is currently no single established dataset to monitor the number of ADHD diagnoses nationally. NHS Digital is working to improve the quality of relevant datasets, such as the Mental Health Services Dataset and the Community Services dataset.