HPCC offers counselling to individuals over the age of 16 living in Edinburgh, but not University staff or students. The centre is supported by the University of Edinburgh and is a practice and research centre for qualified counsellors and counsellors in training. For general information on the Centre see http://www.ed.ac.uk/health/hopepark.

The centre operates 3 rooms for counselling sessions, with associate and volunteer student counsellors. With the current operating hours and appointment durations a maximum of 96 counselling sessions are offered per week. The current database application supporting has been a work in progress for the last 6 or 7 years. The work to design and build the bespoke database application has all been done on a voluntary basis by a retired Information Services employee who has maintained this system since but does no longer wish to be responsible for ongoing support of the system.

The current access database application holds data on staff, clients, their interactions, application data and supporting information. Appointments are recorded within the system and presented in a room bookings diary view. This coupled with a daily planner report allows volunteer staff to man a reception and get an overview of the day ahead. The application has approximately 30-40 custom reports that present a varying range of information including:

• Demonstrating hours worked by student councillors for qualifying credit.
• Summary reports on planned and unplanned endings to patient sessions.
• Anonymised session data for the purposes of research.
• Period evaluation reports that include staff holidays, sick leave, percentage of session capacity used.

A new system is needed to offer reassurance to the HPCC staff that the application is secured and adequately supported, and also to provide them with additional functionality. In particular, teh ability to add value to the data collected so it can be used more often for research data requests.

This small project is supported by the College and will provide the business analysis effort to review the existing system, to gather requirements from the main database users, research possible cloud-based solutions and advise on the best value system that that most closely meets requirements versus cost.