Smartcards (RA)

What is the Registration Authority

Since the introduction of the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS) compliant applications, it is of paramount importance that NHS patients are confident that their medical records are kept secure and confidential in line with the “Care Record Guarantee”. To achieve this objective all healthcare professionals/workers requiring access to NHS CRS compliant applications must be registered and issued with a NHS Smartcard and have appropriate access profiles.

The Registration Authority Service is the process through which Smartcards are provisioned and manages access rights for NHS and other organisations that need to connect to the National Spine and other strategic applications. This is a critical national service to ensure secure, appropriate and effective access to the Spine for NHS staff and other healthcare professionals. The local Registration Authority ensures that individuals providing healthcare services to the   NHS directly, or indirectly, have access to NHS CRS compliant applications/information in accordance with their role. It is the organisation’s responsibility to ensure that the requirements of RA’s are met and maintained to adhere to the “NHS Confidentiality Code of Practice” and the “Care Record Guarantee”.

Trust Registration Authority Structure

The Registration Authority is a hierarchical structure composed on 3 primary layers:

Registration Authority Manager 

The Registration Authority Manager is responsible for the operational management of Registration Authority services within the Trust.

Registration Authority Agent

This role holds delegated responsibility from the Registration Authority Manager to perform operational activities supporting the  use of Smartcards within the Trust; this includes:

• Registering New Smartcard Users
• Confirming changes to user permissions
• Processing of Registration Authority requests.

Sponsor

These individuals are appointed and entrusted to act on behalf of the Trust Executive team, and will determine who should have what access to information contained in national applications and or other similar applications which require access via a Smartcard.

Please remember that the trust has a small number of smartcard sponsors throughout the hospital who can register new users, assign positions, reset passwords, and unlock smartcards, however most of the sponsor actions can now be undertaken using the Smartcard Self Service function.