Thank you.
The project that's currently under way is a study on well-being and military-to-civilian transition. I'm one of the co-principal investigators on that, along with Drs. David Blackburn and Maya Eichler from the Université du Québec en Outaouais and Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. This study is a qualitative, in-depth, longitudinal study. This is going to give us, for the first time, that perspective within Canada of what happens as serving members cross into civilian life.
We hope to recruit about 100 members about six months prior to their intended discharge release date, and to be able to follow them for up to two and a half years after that release. This study will really become a critical piece in helping us all understand a little bit better what some of the patterns or factors might be in optimizing a successful transition. Part of that successful transition includes positive mental health and well-being.
Right now we don't have a clear understanding, nationally, around what it is that may or may not create the conditions for successful transition. Some people leave service and we would expect them to do well, but after a period of time they really struggle. Their mental health struggles really emerge in a way that may happen post-release. Maybe they weren't identified prior to release, but it becomes apparent after release. Some of those issues may be contingent upon the reality that it's a significant change in identity, a significant sense of attachment and place. It's very different when you take off the uniform and you're now working to find that same sense of belonging and structure as a civilian. Some of those things may be part of a natural issue, and may not in any way be related to service exposures. We just don't know enough about that in a longitudinal way, so this really will be an important piece as we go forward.
We're just at the stages now where we're about to go into our ethics review for that study. We're looking to kick that off in the spring with full-on recruitment.
One of the biggest challenges we have in Canada to serving veteran health needs really comes from our current inability to identify veterans within health care systems. When serving personnel end their service, their health care transitions from the federal system to the civilian provincial system. Veterans live everywhere across the country, across all provinces and all territories, in urban and rural settings. You can imagine that quite a variety of services might be available in the wide range of what is Canada, but Canada does not have the ability right now to systematically identify where the veterans are, how they use health care services, how their health care needs compare to civilians', and how then, as a result, to understand their needs in order to provide the supports and programs at the right time, in the right place.
Last year, in the Journal of Military, Veteran and Family Health, researchers within the CIMVHR network identified, through collaboration with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, or ICES, a way to study the health and health service utilization of veterans who re-entered the Canadian public health care system in Ontario between 1990 and 2014. Recognizing that veterans re-enter the system across Canada, we also do know, from some previous work from Veterans Affairs Canada, that about a third of veterans do seem to migrate to Ontario upon release. It is a good sample for us to be able to begin the important work.
Through this study, as they continue their analysis, this group of researchers will be able to give us more information that will inform the diagnostic and treatment patterns related to mental health, as well as to enable those comparisons between veteran and civilian health. Other research that has been published within the Journal of Military, Veteran and Family Health suggests that most recently released veterans do, in fact, adjust well, but there do appear to be chronic conditions that are experienced at a much more common rate for veterans.
Dr. Jim Thompson and his colleagues published a review of population studies on the mental health of Canadian Armed Forces veterans and found that veterans who have recently released experience higher rates of mental health issues than the broader Canadian population as well as veterans from previous eras and conflicts. There does seem to be something substantive happening that is different for this cohort of veterans as they are releasing.
Of note as well, we're not alone as a country in struggling to understand transition. We are working on the global stage trying to look to what is understood around military-to-civilian transition experiences and outcomes across countries to be able to compare across the countries, and also to take lessons learned that maybe we can leverage so that we can catalyze the whole structure better and get there faster. Some of those countries include the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia.
Thank you.