Planned Change - Smartcard Authentication Software Deprecation [Action required]

NHS England is making planned changes to the way the Care Identity Service (CIS) handles logins. These changes are designed to improve security and will block older, outdated connection types used by legacy versions of their software.

Most devices should have the most recent version, as we have already rolled this out. However, we have identified a small number of devices still running this outdated software and are contacting the staff members assigned to these devices to arrange updates. If you missed that communication, here’s everything you need to know.

What’s happening

If your computer or application uses one of these older connections, you may:

➡️See a warning message saying your software is unsupported (can happen any time)

➡️See a message saying your smartcard has expired — in many cases this will not actually be true and is just a misleading error message caused by the connection issue

➡️Be unable to log in during the planned outage times below and see an error message such as:

“The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send”

Planned outage times:

Mon 19 Aug 2025 – 3:00pm to 3:15pm
Mon 1, 8, 15, 22 & 29 Sep 2025 – 3:00pm to 4:00pm

From Wed 15 Oct 2025, 3:00pm – older connections will be permanently blocked

What you need to do

If you see any of the warning or error messages:

Log a ticket on the IT Service Desk portal immediately, including the MKC number(s) of the devices you are seeing this error on (this helps us fix it faster).

Related Articles

Disabling devices and why we do it?