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Dutch benzodiazepine discontinuation letter programmes

Also: Nijmegen stepped-care letter programme · Groningen GP letter study

GPs mailed long-term benzodiazepine users a letter advising them to taper and stop, sometimes after a GP course on benzodiazepines, with a follow-up consultation offer; a later trial tried to scale it through community pharmacies.

Years
1998–now
Country
Netherlands
Topic
Low value carePatient safetySleep
Asks people to
Stop
Strategy
Self efficacy
Channel
Direct mail
Audience
Adults
long-term benzodiazepine users, GPs

Evidence

Quasi-experimentalPositive

Nijmegen (2,425 users vs 1,821 controls): prescribing fell 26% vs 9% at 21 months; 24% vs 12% quit at 6 months; no switch to antidepressants. Groningen: 16% bigger fall at 6 months. Computer-tailored letters doubled quitting vs a generic GP letter (RCT, 508 patients). Scaling via pharmacies stalled on GP engagement (only 10-14% of users got letters in 4 months).

Sponsor (who paid)

  • Radboud University Nijmegen / University Medical Center Groningen Academic

Credits (who made it)

Not recorded yet.

Sources

  1. Discontinuation of long-term benzodiazepine use by sending a letter to users in family practice evaluation · 2005 · DOI 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2004.09.001 · PMID 15769557
  2. General Practitioners reduced benzodiazepine prescriptions in an intervention study: a multilevel application evaluation · 2007 · DOI 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2006.11.024 · PMID 17884604
  3. Long-term effectiveness of computer-generated tailored patient education on benzodiazepines evaluation · 2008 · DOI 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2008.02141.x · PMID 18339112
  4. Implementation of a discontinuation letter to reduce long-term benzodiazepine use--a cluster randomized trial evaluation · 2008 · DOI 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2008.07.009 · PMID 18801626
  5. Minimal interventions to decrease long-term use of benzodiazepines in primary care: a systematic review and meta-analysis reference · 2011 · DOI 10.3399/bjgp11X593857 · PMID 22152740

Research notes

Created 2026-10-23 from the sleep campaign literature search (PubMed and web search; OpenAlex was unreachable), see docs/sleep-campaigns-literature.md. Findings are paraphrased from abstracts, not full texts; official URLs come from search results and were not opened. Start year from the craving paper's data collection (August 1998). UK (Cormack 1994) and Norwegian (Mouland 1997) letter RCTs are earlier precedents.

Record cases/nl-benzodiazepine-discontinuation-letters.json, updated 2026-10-23· Link to this campaign