Home General FAQs
A range of frequently asked questions can be found below.
Accessibility
I live in Wales (or Scotland) and do not work in England. Do I need a smartcard ?
No, the Electronic Prescription Service is being offered in England only. Scotland and Wales have separate national IT programmes.
I live in Wales but locum occasionally in England. How do I go about obtaining a card?
You will require a smartcard to access the Electronic Prescription Service in pharmacies in England. You will be able to obtain a smart card from the PCT in the area that you work.
What is Role Based Access Control (RBAC)?
This defines a national standard set of:
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job roles related activities;
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and areas of work
These are approved by a sponsor and granted by the Registration Authority to a user of NHS CRS applications. Each application, such as EPS, uses these definitions to enable access to specific functionality and information.
The Registration Process
What is the 'Registration Authority' and what is their role?
The Registration Authority is responsible for registering and verifying the identity of NHS staff who need to use the NHS Care Records Service and related IT systems and services, including Choose and Book and the Electronic Prescriptions Service.
Local organisations have responsibility for establishing their own Registration Authority service – this may be within a Primary Care Trust, a shared local health community service or a wider shared service.
Local Registration Authorities are responsible for the three-stage registration process:
Validating Users: This involves obtaining a completed registration form from an applicant (Form EPS01 for EPS release 1). The RA Manager/agent must also check evidence of identity (for example a passport or photo driving license) and ensure that an appointed sponsor has vouched for an applicant and confirmed their role assignment (the level of access to information an individual should have, based on their job profile).
Registering User Profiles: The RA Manager/agent will register applicants as authorised users. An individual's name, job role, level of access and organisation (e.g. the name of a pharmacy) will be stored in the national user directory. Locums are registered as locums.
Issuing smartcards: The RA manager/agent will take the photograph of applicants and print this on the smartcard. Users will be able to use the system to select a private login passcode (numbers and/or letters).
PCTs may choose how they issue the cards.
Who can act as a sponsor and what is their role?
Registration Authority Managers have been advised to consult with local pharmacy representatives to propose individuals who could act as sponsors. For Release 2 a key consideration is accessibility of sponsors. PSNC is advocating that a representative in each pharmacy premises is given sponsorship responsibility, for example the pharmacist-in-charge or branch manager.
A sponsor is required to support registration applications. The sponsor is responsible for confirming that the details provided by an applicant are correct and identifying the level of access an individual should have, based on centrally defined guidance. Registration Authorities are responsible for ensuring that sponsors understand and acknowledge the responsibilities and obligations of that role, and that these are made clear to the Sponsor’s employer if appropriate.
Information Held on Cards
My Local PCT Registration Authority has recently requested my National Insurance Number. Do I need to provide this information?
The National Insurance Number (NIN) is shortly to become a mandatory field in the Spine User Directory which is the database that contains individual’s user profiles for access to national systems such as the Electronic Prescription Service.
The NIN will be used to support registration authorities in identifying individuals on the smart card registration system. The Department of Health has received confirmation from the Information Commissioner and the Department of Work and Pensions that the NIN number can be used for this purpose.
If individuals did not originally provide this information when applying for an EPS Release 1 smart card, they will need to provide this information when renewing their registration or editing registration details.
My PCT has asked me to set-up an Account recovery Passcode. What is this?
The Account Recovery Pass-code is used by the RA to confirm the identity of a registered User. For example, if support is being provided to the user over the telephone, the RA could ask the user to provide, for example, the 1st, 5th and 8th characters from the pass-code to confirm an individual’s identity. The pass-code is set by the user themselves during the registration meeting with the RA, a face-to-face meeting with the RA is therefore normally required to set this pass-code. At present, when using EPS Release 1, a pharmacist would not be disadvantaged by not having an account recovery pass-code setup but it will be helpful, in the longterm for pharmacists to ensure that the Account Recovery Passcode is set.
Problems with Obtaining Cards
My PCT has told me that they will not be issuing cards at present. Who should I contact to resolve ths?
PCTs are being performance managed on the issuing of smart cards to pharmacists.
If a PCT is refusing to issue cards and is therefore delaying the implementation of EPS, we would recommend contacting your LPC in the first instance who will be able to take this up with the PCT locally.
Use of the System without a Card
Can a pharmacy access nominated prescriptions that have been downloaded without a smartcard (in Release 2)?
No, a pharmacy system can automatically download nominated prescriptions from the spine without a smartcard being present, for example overnight, however those prescriptions are not fully accessible by the local system without a Smartcard being present. After a smartcard has been presented, and the user authenticated, the prescriptions then become local patient medication records. It will be possible to access the local patient medication records held on the system without a smartcard, subject to the local system security controls. These controls are likely to vary between systems.
Other
What is e-GIF Level 3?
e-GIF stands for e-government interoperability framework. It is a set of policies and standards to enable information to flow seamlessly across the public sector. As part of the framework, four confidentiality levels were set (zero to three) representing degrees of impact of disclosure of private information. The levels are layered according to the severity of consequences that might arise. Level 3 which imposes the most stringent security requirements around confidentiality has been adopted for the NHS CRS.
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