Based in three offices near the Freud Family’s original London home in Hampstead Heath, The Anna Freud Centre is using the internet to make a global difference in helping children in emotional distress. An Easynet Connect customer for the last five years, The Anna Freud Centre needed to upgrade its existing SDSL connection earlier this year following a general audit of its IT assets and suppliers.

Originally a nursery for orphaned children during the Second World War, established in 1947, the Anna Freud Centre has grown to become a world-leading authority on childhood wellbeing and clinical care. As a centre of practice, The Anna Freud Centre provides innovative clinical services and treatment for distressed children and support and advice for parents. As a centre of learning it is dedicated to understanding children's emotional development through training mental health professionals, conducting pioneering research and advising practitioners, universities and governments around the world.

Andrew Kaponi, Finance Manager, The Anna Freud Centre, explains: “We’ve always appreciated how internet connectivity can help us improve and expand the work we do but it has now become critical to how we deliver much of what we do. Part of our work is providing vital medical and legal documents and case notes to local Primary Care Trusts and other emergency services, so we need to be able to send highly sensitive data, often at short notice. Given that at times children’s welfare can be at stake as well as the smooth running of legal proceedings, it is clear why we need a flexible and reliable Internet connection.”

“Whilst we only have three offices, we like to think that our work has a much broader impact. For instance, we run affiliated MScs, Diplomas and Certificate programs with 2 major international universities - Yale and University College London - as well as running training courses for carers up and down the UK which require remote working tools. We also support over 65 projects nationwide, which frequently rely on sending or accessing data via the internet. Our organisation works around the principal that we must reach out to people and where possible make a difference and the internet is proving a major tool in helping us do this.”

“Whilst our current use of the web has been growing for some time, we also have plans to use the internet to extend our work even further. It had been obvious for some time that we’d need an internet connection with higher speeds and greater capacity and reliability than our existing SDSL Easynet Connect connection in order to keep up to pace with our growth as an organisation. We also wanted a connection with scalability to take our online operations to the next level when we needed it. We’ve introduced online booking systems for courses on our website and we plan to carry out teaching and product training and evidence submission, using online audio / video facilities. This will save our staff the need to travel quite as much as well as make our knowledge and resources more readily available. However, we understood that to do this we needed to increase the bandwidth of our web connection.”

“Our 2Mbps SDSL connection had served us very well for a number of years, however, we wanted to make even greater use of the web as a tool and it became evident whilst auditing our IT that we would need greater bandwidth, including good upload speeds. We saw Easynet Connect’s EtherStream™ solution as a preferred alternative to a leased line, particularly with its 20 day installation pledge, considerably less than many other providers were offering. Easynet Connect has excellent SLAs and strong customer support which we wanted to continue with, as well as the good relationship we had built up over the years with our Easynet Connect account manager.”