• WE write in response to your report about the possible closure of the REST Project, Mind in Camden (Clinic closure ‘short-sighted’, January 25).

We are service users of the REST Project, who have directly benefited from the project’s 30 years’ experience of supporting people with benzodiazepine dependency and withdrawal.

Benzodiazepines are medications usually prescribed for anxiety or insomnia. They are only supposed to be taken for two to four weeks, but many in the UK are prescribed them for much longer and have become dependent on them, making it difficult to stop.

Withdrawal symptoms include seizures, panic attacks and sleeplessness, which can last months or years. The REST Project supports people to withdraw off these medications safely.

We want to make clear to all concerned that we were not consulted on the recent decision by Camden Clinical Commissioning Group to withdraw funding from the project in March 2019.

The first we heard of it was in a meeting in November with commissioner Peter Gates. Mr Gates said that he was there as a messenger and was not involved in the decision to withdraw our funding.

He told us that if we wanted to find out who made the decision we should “Google” the names of his colleagues at the CCG. He also suggested that if we want to contest the decision we should speak to our MPs.

Many of us present at that meeting (30 to 40 of us) understood that, in Mr Gates’s view, the project could be subsumed into existing drug and alcohol services. We felt alarmed by this, as the majority of us have never taken illicit drugs.

Mr Gates did not inform us of any other plans moving forward, nor did he put anything in writing.

You reported Camden CCG’s Richard Elphick, who did not attend the meeting, said “…new services will be in place from April 2019 onwards”. That was the first we had known of it. It would seem that informing the media has taken priority over informing service users.

We would like to ask the CCG why they are willing to throw away the experience, knowledge, and expertise of the REST Project, who have helped thousands of people over the years on a shoe-string budget of £48,425 a year?

REST has consistently met all of its performance targets set by the CCG. Surely a “new” service cannot offer such a wealth of experience or such a good track record? Is this change for change’s sake?

SERVICE USERS
REST Project
Names & addresses supplied