Get started with Apply for Care ID

1. You'll need a link to the service - https://apply-for-care-identity.care-identity-service2.nhs.uk/authenticate

2. Registration Authority (RA) managers or agents, and sponsors will need Windows Hello, a security key or smartcard with one of these roles assigned: 

• R5080: Registration Authority manager
• R5090: Registration Authority agent
• B0267: Registration Authority ID checker
• B1300: Sponsor

3. You'll need to provide the applicant's: 

• name
• email address - NHS or other (email domain allow list on CIM for user verification) - we also accept Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Live, Outlook and iCloud
• mobile phone number

View our support pages to find out more about: 

• starting to use the service
• guidance for known issues 

Apply for Care ID allows RAs to invite large groups to take photos of their own documents which are verified by a centralised team of NHS Digital ID checkers. If approved, this automatically creates a profile in Care Identity Management.

This can be used to support with issuing large numbers of smartcards, or other authenticators, for students.

We have been working closely with the University of Birmingham and Oxford University teaching hospitals, among others, to issue smartcards to their students.

If you want to discuss student onboarding using Apply for Care ID, contact [email protected]. 

ESR and Apply for Care ID

If your organisation can create CIS profiles through ESR, Apply for Care ID may not provide as much benefit as it does for organisations where this is not the case.

Apply for Care ID does not integrate with ESR and can be seen as a different way of verifying a new member of staff’s identity in a robust way and automatically creating a CIS profile in CIM.

Where organisations do use ESR to create CIS identities in CIM, there are sometimes other use cases where ‘Apply for Care ID’ might be used, for example, with onboarding large groups of applicants.

HR onboarding and Apply for Care ID

We are aware that there is some duplication of effort between checking an individual’s identity during the recruitment process and then verifying their identity to issue them with an authenticator.

We are focused on refining and developing the technology for Apply for Care ID but are considering how, in the future, this service might be used to reduce duplication between HR onboarding and issuing authenticators.

We do not have current plans to integrate with software such as Trac. The focus of our project is to verify identities to create CIS profiles for staff that need access to National clinical technology services. 

Information about our privacy policy and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA)

We have published information about how we handle data in the approved authentication tokens privacy policy for CIS2 and CIS users.

Apply for Care ID in universities

During our Apply for Care ID pilot with universities we successfully issued smart cards to over 700 students without the need for a face-to-face meeting with a Registration Authority (RA).

Find out more about our pilot and how the service benefits RAs, students and student support teams.