Luke Bradford: Royal College of GP's Medical Director on softening access to ADHD treatment

Assessment processes will still be rigorous for prescribing ADHD medication. 

From February, GPs and nurse practitioners will be able to prescribe treatments from the outset without a specialist recommendation.  

Wait times for specialist appointments vary but can be over a year.  

Royal College of GPs medical director Dr. Luke Bradford told Mike Hosking it's a good move to help people access diagnoses more quickly and affordably.  

He says it will be under a specialist interest type GP who will have to up-skill through training courses to prescribe. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From early next year. GP is going to be able
to help you with the ADHD trouble until now as
you need a psych and given the round enough of them.
There's a backlog. So Doctor Luke Bredford is the Medical
Director of the Royal College of GPS and is with
us Looke morning to you well in Mike, good move.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Yeah, we believe it is. Don't help people access diagnosis
and treatment, make it quicker and more affordable.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
How realistic was the psych in the process anyway, or
was it more a box ticking exercise by somebody perceived
to be higher up the latter.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
No. It got brought in the nineteen nineties because of
a fear that the stimulants were being diverted and abused
as a street drug, which has been shown not to
be the case. It is quite a complicated diagnosis. It
takes sort of upwards of an hour to get through
the whole process. So that's where it's sort of sat
with psychiatry.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Are the GPS able to do it and do it comfortably?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
So we're going to It will be under sort of
a specialist interest type GP, so it'll be a particular appointment.
It will be a much longer appointment, and these gps
will lap to up skilled do some training courses, much
the same way as if you went to see a
GP to have a skin cancer removed, it'd been a
gpu'ed up skill to do that. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Are we finally getting to this because there was movement
around the access to certain drugs, there's now this change coming.
Are we finally dealing with ADHD in a way we
probably should have been for quite a while.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah. I think there's a lot more awareness of where
it is in society and probably the harm its cause,
and we see it through corrections massively and through MSD stats.
But it's been underdiagnosed and undermanaged, especially in some groups.
I think there probably is a bit of a danger,
but it's also become a bit saddy through the TikTok
type generation and we just have to make sure that

(01:42):
the assessment process is really rigorous for that good.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Stuff go well, look, appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Look.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Bradford who's the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners
a note ironically, in referencing the business of we were
a bit worried that certain things would happen at the drugs.
We're a bit worried about Pseudoithandrin too we won't we
until well suddenly you can get it now and Summing
and Brown was in the house on it yesterday. David
Seymour was making jokes about it and if you have
no idea what I'm talking about, it was moderately funny.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
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