The story
The challenge
Rephael House has provided a safe place to recover, develop and grow through a range of counselling services. In operation since 1997, the charity has built a strong reputation across North London, with over 30 therapists based in Finchley delivering low-cost and fully-funded counselling for children and young people, bereavement, general counselling, domestic abuse and ante- and post-natal emotional health.
By 2019, the charity was running on a dated Microsoft Access database that could no longer keep up with its growth. Adding therapists, tracking outcomes and producing reports for funders had become slow, manual and error-prone.
- Ageing Access database with limited concurrent-user support
- Manual, spreadsheet-based reporting to trustees and funders
- Thousands of client records with de-duplication and quality issues
- Growing therapist team needing secure, role-based access
The solution
Rephael House chose Rhadar in 2019 as its single practice management platform. We worked closely with the CEO and admin team to make sure Rhadar met the specific needs of the charity, engineering a number of customisations into the system so it matched Rephael House's clinical and administrative workflows.
One of the biggest pieces of work was migrating years of history off the old Access database. Our developers built bespoke import scripts to carefully de-duplicate and re-order the data across thousands of records. After extensive testing, the live data was imported into Rhadar and Rephael House was declared operational — with no loss of client history and no interruption to service delivery.
The results
Rhadar has been the primary tool for Rephael House since 2019 and is used daily by the admin team, therapists and service users. The move to Rhadar delivered:
- A single secure, UK-hosted platform for the whole charity
- Automated outcome tracking and funder-ready reporting
- Centralised client records with full audit trails
- Time back for admin and therapists to focus on service delivery
“Since day one, Rhadar has been a game changer for Rephael House. We went from a very manual, tedious process to a hugely efficient system that not only is very easy to use, but allows for all information to be available at the click of a button. The reports alone have increased the charity's efficiency more than we would have ever thought. We cannot imagine being without Rhadar.”
What's next
More than five years on, Rhadar continues to be the beating heart of Rephael House's operations — a live example of how a modern, UK-hosted practice management system can transform a smaller mental health charity's efficiency and quality of care.
