Our Story
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. We expanded and opened more houses in the 1980s.
In the early 1990s, a large increase in funding for the substance misuse field focussed on HIV prevention. Many of the resulting services were harm reduction-based. Phoenix House decided not to get involved in such activity as it contradicted the mission and competencies of the organisation. Our services were abstinence-based, for clients who wanted to be 'clean' and had stopped taking illegal drugs before they walked through the door.
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, whilst continuing to avoid 'classic' harm reduction activities such as needle exchange.
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 our service users 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 misuse organisations in the UK, we take pride in our ability to support changed lives from the street through to resettlement.
