Using research to support young people to understand adult services

We’ve published a new evidence summary that explores how young people transitioning to adulthood understand what services are available to support them.

Through our priority setting exercise on transitions to adult care, we heard that young people transitioning from children’s to adults’ services sometimes face barriers.  They include:

• a lack of clear information about what support is or isn’t available from adult services
• difficulty knowing how to access support, and
• poor information sharing between child and adult services.

This evidence summary looks at research that explains more about these problems and how they can be addressed. 

Research shows that simply providing information on adult services isn’t enough to make sure that young people access the support they need. Young people need to be both able and willing to look for, access, understand, and act on this information. 

The barriers that can prevent access and understanding include:

• a fear of rejection
• not knowing what’s out there
• information being inaccessible or unrealistic, and 
• information that takes too much time and energy to understand. 

Our new evidence summary breaks down the process of looking for help, to show where young people experience barriers to understanding information.  We also look at young people who haven’t engaged with the services that are available to them, to understand how this is linked to barriers around understanding and sharing information.