What if you could access hospital-grade addiction treatment from your own home – with no waiting lists, and no one at work finding out?
That’s exactly what Clean Slate Clinic has built. Founded in 2020, this fully virtual detox and recovery programme is transforming how people get help for alcohol and drug dependence – and the results speak for themselves: a 3-month relapse rate of just 7%, against an industry average closer to 70%.
London Law Collective sat down with Leana Schepis, Head of Marketing at Clean Slate Clinic to hear the story behind the clinic – from a GP watching patients fall through the cracks during COVID, to a CEO who became their very first patient, to a mission to reach one million people by 2036.
Their model challenges our assumptions about addiction treatment: that you need to check into a facility, that geography determines access, that recovery isn’t possible without disrupting your whole life.
Read the full interview below 👇
Tell us about the origin of Clean Slate, how it started and what inspired the founders to set it up?
Clean Slate was founded in 2020 by three people who came to the problem from very different angles but landed on the same conviction: that access to treatment for alcohol and other drug dependence shouldn’t depend on your postcode, your income, or your willingness to check into a facility.
Dr Chris Davis, our co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, had spent over a decade as a GP watching people fall through the cracks. Not because they didn’t want help – but because the system made getting it so hard. During COVID, as isolation worsened and services closed their doors, he started developing a virtual care model that could reach people where they were, especially those in rural and remote communities with no realistic path to inpatient care.
Pia Clinton-Tarestad, our CEO and co-founder, came to the business with twenty years of healthcare systems experience. What the wider world didn’t know at the time was that she was also navigating her own dependence on alcohol. When Chris invited her to help build the service, neither of them knew that she would become patient zero – going through the very programme she’d go on to help scale. That lived experience sits at the heart of everything we do.
Joining them was Chris Raine, founder of Hello Sunday Morning – one of Australia’s most significant alcohol behaviour change movements. He understood deeply how to shift cultural norms around drinking, one person and one story at a time.
Together, they built something that had never really existed before: a clinically rigorous, fully virtual, home-based detox and recovery programme. No waiting lists. No admission. No-one at work finding out. Just real clinical support from your home.
Can you tell us about what the business does and how it operates?
At its core, Clean Slate is a one-stop shop for people who want to change their relationship with alcohol, stimulants, or cannabis. We provide everything from clinical assessment and medicated detox, through to pharmacotherapy for relapse prevention and psychosocial recovery support – all delivered virtually.
Every client gets a dedicated clinician assigned from day one. During detox week, that means daily check-ins and medication reviews. Over the following eleven months of aftercare, it means ongoing clinical follow-up’s, drop-in support sessions, on-demand masterclasses, digital tools and peer support group sessions.
What makes this genuinely different is the clinical rigour behind it. We’re not a wellbeing app or a coaching platform, we’re delivering hospital-grade protocols – daily monitoring, prescriber oversight, structured escalation pathways – just without the hospital. Our outcomes reflect that with our relapse rate at three months sitting at around 7%, against an industry average closer to 70%.
We now operate in Australia and the UK, and we work across a multi-payor model that includes private health insurers, Government contracts, and direct-to-consumer. In Australia, we have coverage across 30+ private health funds, including Bupa, Medibank and NIB. The UK launched less than a year ago and is already generating meaningful revenue and building its own payor pipeline.
Your role is to market Clean Slate. How do you promote it, and what channels and methods do you use?
Everything starts with understanding the person on the other side. The nature of what we do means our clients are often in a private, complicated place when they reach out, and they’ve usually been thinking about this for a period of time. So our job as marketers is to reduce the distance between that private thought and taking action, without ever making people feel pushed or judged.
A big focus for us is storytelling and lived experience. Nothing cuts through stigma like hearing from someone who has been there. Our client stories and the personal openness of our founders are some of our most powerful assets.
In terms of channels, paid Meta and Google are our core performance engines. But we also invest heavily in PR, clinician engagement, and the community and partnership relationships that build long-term trust. It’s not just about reach for us, it’s about credibility. When a GP refers a patient, or a health fund partners with us, that means something that a paid ad can’t replicate.
Our organic strategy ties it all together with a focus on content that’s useful, honest, and human. We’re not in the business of alarm tactics or shame-based messaging. We’re trying to normalise help-seeking, and that takes consistency over time.
There’s a B2B element to Clean Slate as well as B2C. How does that affect your marketing and audience engagement?
Honestly, right now our energy is primarily on the B2C side – getting to the people who need us, meeting them where they are, and removing every possible barrier between them and taking that first step. That’s where the greatest immediate impact lives.
That said, B2B is absolutely part of the picture, and we’re laying those foundations deliberately. A lot of what we produce to validate our programme – outcomes data, case studies, partner testimonials – serves both audiences simultaneously. When a GP sees the evidence, or a health fund sees the clinical and cost outcomes, it reinforces why they should be recommending or funding us. And when a prospective client sees that Bupa or their employer is backing us, it builds the kind of trust that’s very hard to manufacture through advertising alone.
So while the tactics differ – direct-response creative for consumers, relationship-led conversations for enterprise – the underlying message is the same: this works, it’s safe, and it changes lives.
What’s next for Clean Slate? How do you see the company growing over the next few years?
We’re in the process of raising our Series A funding to prove out the UK market with the same rigour we applied in Australia, continue to scale our payor relationships in both markets, and invest heavily in the technology and data layer that makes us more effective at every stage of the care journey.
Beyond that, we want to reach one million people by 2036 and change the paradigm of addiction to one of hope and lasting resilience. That requires us to think about what the platform looks like as it extends beyond a single market or a single substance category.
What keeps us motivated is that the problem is so much bigger than most people realise. There are over 200 million people globally with alcohol use disorder, and 80% of them have no access to clinical treatment. We’ve proven that you can deliver safe, effective, hospital-grade care without a hospital. Now it’s about reaching those people.
Would you recommend working with LLC and what was the experience of working with them like?
Without hesitation. What we loved about working with LLC from the outset was their focus on supporting impact organisations – that values alignment is a real short-cut to trust and a great working relationship. We also really appreciated the responsiveness and adaptability of LLC, who supported us through our first ever acquisition and the inevitable bumps along the road.
Beyond providing the core legal documents, LLC gave such sound advice throughout on considerations that we wouldn’t even have thought about, from timing and structure of employment contracts and ESOP schemes, to how to most effectively streamline the process.