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BACKGROUND: Alcohol or other drug (AOD) withdrawal is a common reason for patients to seek treatment. Ambulatory, or 'home-based', AOD withdrawal for patients who are low risk is a useful intervention for general practitioners (GPs) to help empower their patients to improve their health and make meaningful change to their AOD use. OBJECTIVE: This article explores the themes of patient choice, safety and optimising success in GP-led withdrawal. The four-step framework of 'who', 'prepare', 'withdrawal' and 'follow-up' outlines how to best support patients in the general practice setting to undertake a withdrawal. DISCUSSION: There are many benefits to a GP-led, home-based AOD withdrawal. The strategies to facilitate choice and safety and to optimise withdrawal success described in the article include careful patient selection, preparing the patient using domains of whole-person care, clarifying the patient's goals and stage of change, support during withdrawal and fostering long-term treatment in general practice.
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Macaulay et al. (2023) studied this question.
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