[School assistance for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the Spanish autonomous regions]

In recent years different Spanish autonomous regions have presented policies on school assistance for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or coordination between the educational and healthcare services, which result in protocols, instructions or guidelines of action.

To determine and compare the proposals put forward by the different Spanish regions with respect to school assistance for ADHD.

After searching for the documents that contain these policies, the information therein was analysed with the aim of being able to compare them in several different areas: document, scope of application, detection of ADHD, diagnosis, school measures, follow-up of the proposals of the Guidelines on clinical practice in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, grounds and resources offered.

The Valencian Region is the only one for which no documents were found. The document for the Balearic Islands was not analysed because it is not public, and in the other regions differences were found in the degree of compliance with the criteria assessed in each area. The policies in Extremadura, Galicia, Catalonia and Navarra are the ones that meet the largest number of criteria. All the regions with policies on ADHD propose some kind of school measures and resources such as bibliographical references, contacts or models of documents or screening tools. All of them, except Madrid, offer information about the detection and diagnosis of ADHD.

There are differences among the proposals for school assistance for ADHD in Spain, and those of Extremadura, Galicia, Catalonia and Navarra are found to be the most complete.