The Forces in Mind Trust has awarded funds of £78,216 to King’s College London for a seven-month follow on study into the types of mental health problems that UK ex-Service personnel present with to secondary mental health services and their pathways through treatment.
The findings will be contrasted with non-veterans accessing the same services. The researchers will also develop a tool that will enable the automatic identification of veterans’ mental health services records, as at the moment no indicator is present related to past military service. This means that the sample size can be increased substantially, and additional variables related to treatment pathways can be explored.
Ray Lock, Chief Executive of the Forces in Mind Trust, said:
“The extension of this project, undertaken by King’s College London, will enable policy makers and service providers to make informed decisions and deliver the help that a small cohort of ex-Service personnel require on their transition pathway.”
Dr Sharon Stevelink, King’s College London, said:
“We are excited to undertake the next stage of this unique project. We have shown that it is feasible to manually identify whether patients who accessed secondary mental health care services have served in the military, and this next stage will enable us to automate this process, meaning that it will be quicker and easier to identify veterans for research purposes”.
