We are a group of researchers and mental health experts from 8 different European countries with a special interest in young people’s mental health and what happens when young people need to move from a service, often one for children and young people, to a service for adults – a process often referred to as ‘transition’. Poor or disjointed support and care at this point has been reported in many countries and is a policy concern of many governments. In order to find out the best ways of helping young people transition, over the last three years we have been getting in touch with young people approaching the transition phase of care to invite them to join the MILESTONE study. Young people, their parents and carers and the clinicians working with them, have all been contributing their knowledge and experiences of transition, including trying out a new suite of tools for monitoring young people’s outcomes.
2018 is the start of our final study year and to date, we have succeeded in recruiting over 1000 young people and over 900 parents and carers. We have completed three of the four rounds of data gathering and we are now embarking on the final round of outcomes monitoring and follow-up assessments. All being well, we expect to complete our information gathering by 31th December 2018 and will then begin a cross-country programme of sharing our findings and learning from the study.
If you are one of the participants in the MILESTONE study, we would like to thank you for your continued support and contributions. We are very grateful! If you have not been involved, we hope that you will keep watching for our study findings which we hope will make a real difference to improving transition for all young people in contact with mental health services and their parents and carers.
The MILESTONE team