GIDS Referrals from Royal Free Hospital 2011-23
Reference: 24-25564
Date response sent: 14/04/2025
Details of enquiry
- How many children and adolescents did the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, NW London, refer to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) each year between 2011 and 2023 inclusive?
- Of these, in each year how many of those referred were:
a. presenting with an eating disorder at the time of referral?
b. presenting with a mental health condition?
c. diagnosed as autistic?
d. diagnosed with ADHD?
e. had a history of suffering from physical or mental abuse?
f. had been ‘looked after’?
Response sent
We confirm that only partial data is held by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which cannot be extracted nor reported within the resources provisioned in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
- How many children and adolescents did the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, NW London, refer to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) each year between 2011 and 2023 inclusive?
Electronic Reporting/recording of referral sources is not a mandatory reporting field on our EPR (electronic patient record system), and this data was not consistently reported and would need to be manually calculated.
A manual interrogation of each of the 20,191 GIDS patients referred during the period, would take approximately 1,683 hours at a rate of 5 mins per record, which considerably exceeds the time and resource limit provisioned under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it). Section 12 of FOIA further states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.
This means that as the time required to process just this question within your request falls outside the cost limit for a whole request, your request is refused and exemption from disclosure has been engaged under s12 of FOIA.
We can however advise you on the total number of GIDS referrals received from all sources for the years 2011 to 2023 and shown in the table below.
Furthermore, you may be interested to peruse our the FOI Disclosure Log on our website: FOI Disclosure Log Tavistock and Portman where the Trust has posted its substantive responses to past FOI requests, many of which refer to GIDS. This disclosure log is in 2 parts; Archive for requests April 2016 to Sept 2022, and October 2022 onwards
| All GIDS Referrals Received | |
| Year | No of Referrals |
| 2011 | 182 |
| 2012 | 307 |
| 2013 | 415 |
| 2014 | 627 |
| 2015 | 1,193 |
| 2016 | 1,824 |
| 2017 | 2,558 |
| 2018 | 2,617 |
| 2019 | 2,802 |
| 2020 | 2,314 |
| 2021 | 3,650 |
| 2022 | 1,701 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| Grand Total | 20,191 |
It may further be helpful for you to note that during the period that GIDS was being decommissioned it remained open and continued to treat current patients.
There was a phased transfer of the GIDS waiting list and new referrals to NHSE Arden and Greater East Midlands Commissioning Support Unit (Arden and GEM CSU), as set out below. Once this transfer completed, GIDS no longer managed the waiting list nor new referrals, though it continued to treat current patients.
We therefore can not confirm total referral nor waiting times nor data for the latter period of GIDS services.
Data that the Trust holds, on GIDS waiting times and/or new referrals, is therefore restricted to the periods prior to the changes in patient management, as set out below.
- From July 2021: GIDS referrals from General Practitioners and other non-CAMHS/paediatric referrers were handled by Arden and GEM CSU on behalf of NHS England
- From October 2022 all new referrals from any referrer were redirected to Arden & GEM CSU.
- From 23 March 2023, The whole GIDS waiting list and all new referrals were managed by Arden and GEM.
GIDS no longer held or managed the waiting list for GIDS, the Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Services.
- NHSE/I are the data controllers for the AGEM Referral Hub. Should you wish to contact them directly to learn more about the referrals/waiting list that they hold, the relevant email address is contactus@nhs.net
- GIC (Gender Identity Clinic, for Adults 18yrs+
GIC waiting times are posted on our website at Gender identity clinic – Tavistock and Portman and updated periodically
- Of these, in each year how many of those referred were:
a. presenting with an eating disorder at the time of referral?
b. presenting with a mental health condition?
c. diagnosed as autistic?
d. diagnosed with ADHD?
e. had a history of suffering from physical or mental abuse?
f. had been ‘looked after’?
Please kindly refer to our earlier response to Q1.
The Trust cannot run any electronic reporting on these patients sub-sets as we cannot reliable identify all Royal Free hospital referrals to GIDS, as explained above.
Any data identifying a referral’s co-presenting condition/s would be recorded as freehand text within the clinical notes section of a patient’s file, as there is no data field dedicated to on the EPR.
Manually extracting a referral’s co-presenting condions would entail a thorough reading of the clinical notes section of a patient’s file, which at around 15 minutes per file would take circa 250 hours per thousand files.
This means that the time required to process just this question within your request falls outside the cost limit for a whole request, so this question too is refused and exemption from disclosure has been engaged under s12 of FOIA.
As alreadyexplained above, The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 has set the appropriate limit as £450 based on a generic charge of £25 per hour to determine whether the Trust holds the information, to locate, and then to extract it).
Section 12 of FOIA further states that the authority (ie this Trust) is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the costs of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.
In conclusion, we have tried to be helpful to you by providing above alternative data which may be of interest to you:
a. total GIDS referrals over the period,
b. the sliding scale of referrals received during the GIDS decommissioning process
c. a link to our disclosure log where past responses to GIDS FOI requests may be viewed.
Should you wish to otherwise narrow the scope of your request so that it falls within the provisions of FOIA, then the Trust would treat any reformulated request we receive as a fresh FOI request and we may be able to help you.