The Milestone Study

What is the MILESTONE study?

The MILESTONE study is part of a five-year pan-European project involving eight European partners. It aims to learn from different countries how they currently support young people in transition, what works well, and what does not. The main focus is on young people who need to move on to adult mental health services (AMHS) because of ongoing mental health problems. However, alongside this, MILESTONE aims to also identify those young people who can safely be discharged from specialist mental health services.  

MILESTONE has a number of different aspects to it – for example, it has looked at the different mental health service arrangements for young people in different countries and how long young people stay in services.  Its main focus is to test out whether a managed transition, which involves the use of a new support tool – called the Transition Readiness and Appropriateness Measure (TRAM) - improves the support and planning with young people of transition age. This is done by comparing the experiences of young people in services who have agreed to use the TRAM with services who don’t use this new tool. 

Approval for the research has been granted from different Research Ethics Committees in each of the countries involved in MILESTONE. A steering committee and a special board of independent experts - the Scientific Clinical and Ethical Advisory Board (SCEAB) are in place to oversee how the study is being run.

Current progress in the study

The MILESTONE study is now in its fourth year, and in addition to collecting information from over 1000 young people, there are over 900 parents and carers involved, plus clinicians from both children and young people’s mental health services as well as adult mental health services.

Data has now been collected at three different time points, and the research team is now conducting the fourth and final round of data gathering. At last, a major effort will be made to analyse all data and publish our findings!

We hope you’ll be interested in hearing about the findings as we begin to publish these – so please do keep an eye on the MILESTONE website for alerts as to our publications and the information sharing events that will start later this year.

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