CfH condemns smartcard sharing

One in six GPs claim that NHS staff in their area have shared smartcards, according to a survey by doctors’ magazine Pulse.

The poll of more than 300 GPs found that one in six family doctors said they were aware of NHS staff sharing smartcards in their area, and one in 20 GPs admitted they sharing their own smartcard.

Reasons given included the time taken to log-on to systems or to access data at multiple terminals, and losing cards or leaving them at home.

A spokesperson for NHS Conecting for Health said the sharing of smarcards was unacecceptable and a serious discplinary offence.

“The smartcard only takes seconds to authenticate the user, not much longer than conventional logging on but to a much higher security standard," the spokesperson told EHI Primary Care. "Any delays are likely to be due to the start up time of the local application being used.

“GPs could also help themselves by making sure their reception and administration staff have enough PCs so they don’t need to share, particularly where their staff should not be accessing patients’ clinical data.”

Last month, EHI Primary Care revealed that position-based access control was being introduced for National Programme for IT in the NHS applications to reduce administration costs and deliver a more consistent allocation of access rights, while also eliminating the development of workarounds.

CfH has also issued guidance to users of the NHS secure network on the use of temporary smartcards when staff lose, forget or break their cards or need to provide services in a location or role for which they do not have an appropriate access profile.

It said the latter situation should be solved by the introduction of position based access control.

This week, CfH told EHI Primary Care: “All organisations have guidance on how to set up temporary access for people such as locums or those who leave their smartcard at home – so there is definitely no need and it’s not acceptable to share smartcards.”