The UK's first 'Phoenix House' opened its doors in London in 1969, offering Therapeutic Community (TC) based residential rehabilitation. Throughout the 1970s the Phoenix House TC programme adapted and modernised, becoming less rigid and adding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) based group work to the programme. In the early 1990s, a large increase in funding for the substance use field focussed
on HIV prevention. Many of the resulting services were harm reduction based. The first shift in approach came with the opening of the Fountain Project in 1994, an HIV/AIDS palliative care unit in South London. This service took clients on methadone prescriptions for the duration of their stay. From this point on the organisation began to embrace services for people who were trying to abstain, but were not quite at the point of actually achieving it. As these abstinence-oriented services expanded we won prison contracts where the goal of treatment was abstinence but the clients themselves were more ambivalent. As we developed more Tier 3 structured day services, commissioners increasingly asked us to add open access or Tier 2 elements to our provision. Initially, we embraced Tier 2 work that provided open access/entry points to the treatment system. With good services and strong local leadership we expanded into harm reduction. This has become the third stage of the organisation's evolution, so that we now deliver abstinence based, abstinence oriented and harm reduction services. We have always believed that people who use our services are individuals and that the recovery process for each person is different. We will use whatever interventions and models of service delivery help them along their personal path of recovery. As one of the most diverse substance use organisations in the UK we take pride in our ability to support changed lives from the street through to resettlement.
