Referrals in. Rota, supervision and cost out.
Most staffing plans in regulated pathways fail on follow-up, not assessment. This planner uses the same assumptions we use internally, shows every one of them, and lets you overrule the ones that do not match your service.
Plan roughly 2.5 clinician hours per adult ADHD assessment plus four to six titration reviews per patient in year one. At 100 referrals a month that is about 34 sessions a week at steady state, plus one supervising session for every five to eight whole-time equivalent delivery clinicians.
How much clinical capacity does a UK assessment pathway need? | Reviewed August 2026
Your service
Five numbers most providers already have to hand. Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for the plan.
Assessment plus titration reviews through the first year, prescriber time is the usual bottleneck.
What that actually needs
Adult ADHDSessions a week needed
70.9
8.87 WTE
Gap to close
56.9 sessions
7.12 WTE short
Cost a month
£132,754
£1,106 per referral
- Assessment time
- 340.9 hours a month
- Review and titration time
- 272.7 hours a month
- Steady state rota
- 40.5 sessions a week
- Backlog clearance
- 30.4 extra sessions a week for 12 weeks
- Supervision cover
- 1.48 sessions a week
- Coordination
- 0.94 WTE administrator
If nothing changes
Your current 14 sessions clear about 0 assessments a month against 120 referrals, so the queue grows every month.
What Scale Health can cover today
Turn the gap into a rota you can actually staff.
Send us the plan you just built and we will come back with named availability against it, what those sessions cost this quarter, and what to fill first so follow-up does not collapse.
Questions we get asked about this
How many clinical sessions do I need per 100 ADHD referrals a month?
At 2.5 clinician hours per adult ADHD assessment and a 12 percent DNA rate, 100 referrals a month is roughly 284 assessment hours plus 227 hours of first-year titration reviews, which is about 34 sessions a week once follow-up reaches steady state. Backlog clearance sits on top of that.
Why does follow-up load matter more than assessment slots?
Every patient assessed on a titration pathway generates four to six reviews in the first year. At steady state the monthly review load equals your monthly referral rate multiplied by reviews per patient, so a service planned only around assessment capacity stalls in month six.
What supervision cover does a sessional clinical bench need?
Plan one supervising session a week for every five to eight whole-time equivalent delivery clinicians, depending on pathway and seniority mix. Child pathways and Right to Choose reporting need the tighter ratio.
Can Scale Health tell me who is available before I commit?
Yes. The shortlist preview matches your brief against the live clinician bench and returns anonymised profiles with availability, notice period, prescribing status and compliance, including when the answer is that nobody currently fits.
Building the clinical team rather than the rota? See how our search work runs, or read about the clinical network.
Most pathways fail on follow-up, not assessment.
Thirty minutes with someone who has staffed this pathway before is usually worth more than another spreadsheet. No pitch deck, and a reply within one working day.