As an adolescent you may be experiencing substantial changes in many areas of your life, including school, relationships and work. In addition to this, if you are living with a mental health problem, this may be the period in which the care you receive might also change. As you approach adulthood the services that you receive will move from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to Adult Mental Health Services (AMHS); this is known as transition.
The prospect of transition can seem daunting, especially if you have built up a good relationship with your CAMHS team. However, this transition is important to ensure that you continue to receive appropriate care in adulthood.
The MILESTONE study looks at how to improve transitions for young people like you from CAMHS to AMHS, in the UK and across Europe. The main aim of the study is to make sure that young people move to appropriate services in AMHS so that they continue to receive treatment for their specific mental health problem. Of course, some young people might at this stage be ready to move away from mental health services altogether. In these situations the MILESTONE study aims to identify those young people who can safely leave, or be discharged from, specialist mental health services.
In order to find out the best ways of helping young people transition, whether to adult services or through discharge, we need to get in touch with young people who are approaching the transition phase of care. As service users of CAMHS you are the experts in informing us of your experiences of the transition period and actual transition so that we can identify and improve the link between the different services.
We would also like to speak to another significant person in your life, for example, a parent, carer or partner, to understand how they see the transition process. This will allow the MILESTONE team to get a well-informed view of the transitions phase between mental health services.
By taking part in the study you will be supporting research that will help improve current transition practices locally. What is more, the research will also help improve mental healthcare systems in the UK and across Europe. We hope to engage 1000 young people in eight different European countries in the study!
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