ADP Application with Multiple Conditions

You have four or five conditions and a long form in front of you. The question is not really what to write, it is how to organise it, and there is one rule that settles almost every decision that follows: write one answer per activity, not one answer per condition. Get that right and the rest of the form becomes straightforward. Get it wrong and you can describe genuinely severe difficulties in a way that scores almost nothing. This guide walks through the ADP application as it is actually built, and how to fill it in when several conditions are in play.

How the ADP application is actually built

The application comes in two parts, and they do different jobs.

Part 1 is short. It covers who you are and your contact details, and you have 14 days to submit it once you start. It matters far more than its length suggests, because entitlement is backdated to the date you submit it. Open it early, before you have gathered anything.

Part 2 is the long form and the one that is scored. You have 56 days to return it, and you can ask for more time. It works through the 12 activities in turn, and each activity is laid out the same way:

1. An explanation of what the activity covers, in Social Security Scotland's own words. Read these. They are more specific than people expect and they tell you exactly what is being measured.
2. A yes or no question asking whether you can do the thing. For preparing food, for example, it asks whether you can prepare and cook a simple meal.
3. A set of follow up questions and free text boxes asking you to explain: whether you need reminding or encouraging, whether you need someone with you to stay safe, what aids you use, how long it takes, and how you feel afterwards.

The rule that settles everything: one answer per activity

The strong temptation with several conditions is to organise by diagnosis: explain the arthritis, then the fatigue, then the anxiety, and let the reader work out the consequences.

Do not do this. It invites the case manager to weigh each condition separately, and separately none may look disabling enough. Two conditions that each contribute half of a difficulty can both be dismissed when together they clearly meet a descriptor.

Instead, for each activity, write one answer that draws on whichever conditions are relevant to that activity. Some conditions will appear in eight answers. Some will appear in one. That is expected, and it is what the form is built for. Our guide to ADP for multiple conditions covers why the scoring works this way.

Weak and strong: the same person, the same conditions

Take someone with osteoarthritis, type 2 diabetes and anxiety, answering the preparing food section.

Weak, organised by condition:

"I have arthritis in both hands and my knees. I am also diabetic and have to be careful with my diet. I suffer from anxiety and take medication for it."

Every word true. Nothing scoreable. It names three conditions and describes no difficulty, no help, no time and no risk.

Strong, organised by activity:

"I cannot grip a knife or lift a full pan because of the arthritis in my hands, so I use pre-chopped vegetables, a lightweight pan and a perching stool. I can stand at the hob for about five minutes before my knees force me to sit down. I have burned my forearm twice this year reaching over a hot pan. My blood sugar drops if I leave it too long, which makes me shaky and less safe with a knife, so my husband stays in the kitchen when I cook. On the days my anxiety is worst, which is around 12 days a month, I do not attempt to cook and eat toast or nothing."

Same person, same three conditions. The second version names the aids, gives the standing time, records two accidents, explains the supervision and gives a monthly figure. Every one of those is a scoring point, and all of them were true of the first version. They just were not written down.

Listing your conditions

There is a point in the application where you set out the conditions you live with. Two pieces of advice.

List everything. Including conditions that feel secondary, conditions you are still waiting to have investigated, and conditions you are slightly embarrassed by. Minor is a medical judgement, not a functional one, and a condition you nearly left off is frequently the only one that reaches a particular activity. ADP is scored on effect rather than on confirmed diagnosis, so an unconfirmed problem still belongs there.

Do not rank them by medical seriousness. The condition that sounds worst to a doctor is often not the one that limits the most activities. What matters is which condition reaches the most activities, not which sounds most serious.

Which one you lead with does not change your points, but it does set the frame the reader brings to every answer. See which condition should go first on your ADP form.

The follow up questions people skip

Within each activity there are specific questions that carry a lot of the scoring, and they are the ones that get one word answers. Here is what they are really asking.

Do you need someone to remind or encourage you, and how often?

This is the prompting question, and it is where most of the mental health side of a claim lives. Needing prompting counts as needing help, exactly like needing physical assistance. If you would not eat, wash or take medication without someone telling you to, that is the answer, and "how often" wants a number.

Do you need someone with you to keep you safe, and how often?

The supervision question. Relevant if you are unsteady, if you black out, if your blood sugar drops, if you burn or cut yourself, if you panic, or if you might leave a hob on. Say who supervises and what would happen without them.

Do you need to use anything to help, what and how often?

The aids question. Needing an aid is part of how the activity is scored, so it is evidence of difficulty rather than proof that you cope. Perching stools, adapted cutlery, grab rails, a shower seat, a stick, a pill organiser, a magnifier: all of it counts, including things you bought yourself and things you improvised.

How do you feel afterwards?

The after-effects question, and the one that best captures the combined effect of several conditions. If cooking a meal means you then need to lie down for two hours, or if a shower uses up the whole morning, that is the answer. This is where the reliability test bites hardest, because it goes to whether you can do things repeatedly.

Read the definitions before you answer

Each activity opens with Social Security Scotland's own explanation of what it covers, and those definitions are narrower and more specific than the everyday words suggest. Preparing food, for instance, is about a simple one course cooked meal for one person from fresh ingredients, and it explicitly includes understanding whether food is safe to eat, opening packaging, peeling and chopping at waist height, using a hob at standard height and knowing when food is cooked.

Read that carefully and you will notice several distinct things you may struggle with, where you were about to write one sentence. The same is true across the other activities, and our guides to the daily living component and the mobility component go through what each one is actually asking.

When two conditions affect the same activity differently

A situation that comes up constantly and confuses people: one condition makes an activity slow, another makes it unsafe, and a third makes it unrepeatable. Which do you write?

All three, in the same answer. The four reliability tests are separate hurdles, and failing any one of them matters. So an answer that says "it takes me forty minutes, I have burned myself twice, and afterwards I cannot do anything else for the rest of the afternoon" is failing the time test, the safety test and the repeatedly test at once. That is a much stronger answer than picking whichever difficulty feels most dramatic.

The same applies where conditions pull in opposite directions. Someone whose pain is worst in the morning and whose medication makes them drowsy in the afternoon does not have a good part of the day, they have two bad ones for different reasons. Say that explicitly, because a reader who sees only "mornings are difficult" will assume the afternoon is fine.

A practical order of work

Doing this in the right sequence makes it far less exhausting.

1. Submit part 1 first, before anything else. It fixes your entitlement date and buys you 56 days.
2. Do the mapping exercise on paper. Conditions down the side, 12 activities across, ticks where each condition affects each activity.
3. Keep a diary for two weeks if you can. Dates, what you could not do, who helped, how long things took. It turns vague recollection into the numbers the boxes are asking for.
4. Write the activities where your ticks cluster first, while you have energy. Leave the sparse ones for last.
5. Do not do it in one sitting. Twelve activities written in an afternoon produces four good answers and eight thin ones, and the thin ones are worth just as many points.
6. Name your professionals with accurate contact details, from every service involved. Social Security Scotland has a duty to help gather supporting information, and case managers can request reports directly from the people you name, as our supporting information guide explains.

Before you send it

Four checks, each of which catches a common and expensive mistake.

• Did you describe a bad day or an average one? Where things fluctuate, the description that applies on more than half the days is the one that should be used. Count the days on which any of your conditions stops you, not each condition separately.
• Did you leave any activity nearly blank? An empty box scores nothing. If an activity genuinely does not affect you, that is fine, but check it is genuinely rather than because you ran out of energy.
• Did you include help you already receive? The question is what you need, not what you currently manage without. Help from a partner counts exactly like help from a paid carer.
• Did you say what it costs you? Doing something and then losing the rest of the day to it is a scoring point in its own right.

Keep a copy of what you send, with the date. If you want to check your answers against the four reliability tests before posting, our guide to the reliability criteria sets them out.

If the determination goes against you

Refusals are common: of the 419,690 applications decided by 30 April 2026, 44 per cent were authorised and 53 per cent were denied. With several conditions, a refusal often means the form was read as a list of separate problems rather than as one combined limitation.

You have 42 days to ask for a re-determination and Social Security Scotland has 56 days to look again, with 46 per cent of those completed allowed. After that you have 31 days to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland, where more than half of decided appeals have been upheld.

A re-determination is also your chance to fix the structural problem. If your original form was organised by condition, rewriting two or three key activities as combined answers, with numbers and after-effects, is usually more effective than adding more medical letters. Our guide on what to do if you are refused sets out the sequence, and free help with the form is available from Citizens Advice Scotland and local welfare rights teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I fill in the ADP form with several conditions?

One answer per activity, not one per condition. For each of the 12 activities, describe the combined effect of whichever conditions are relevant. Organising by diagnosis lets each be weighed and dismissed separately.

How is the ADP application structured?

Two parts. Part 1 is short, due within 14 days, and fixes your entitlement date. Part 2 is the scored form with 56 days to return it, working through the 12 activities with a yes or no question then free text boxes for each.

Is the yes or no question the one that scores?

No, it is a gate. The points come from the free text boxes underneath it, covering reminding, supervision, aids, how long things take and how you feel afterwards.

Should I list conditions I think are minor or unconfirmed?

Yes to both. Minor is a medical judgement, not a functional one, and ADP is scored on effect rather than confirmed diagnosis. Do not rank by medical seriousness, since the worst-sounding condition often limits the fewest activities.

What does the question about needing reminding or encouraging mean?

It asks whether you need someone to get you started, and prompting counts as help just like physical assistance. If you would not eat, wash or take medication without being told to, say so and give a number for how often.

Why does the form ask how I feel after doing something?

Because it captures after-effects, which go to whether you can do something repeatedly. Needing to lie down for two hours after cooking means you are not managing the activity as the rules require, even though you completed it.

What if I already sent a form organised by condition?

Fix it at re-determination, requested within 42 days. Rewriting two or three key activities as combined answers with numbers and after-effects usually helps more than adding more medical letters.