Locks and Security News: your weekly locks and security industry newsletter
2nd September 2026 Issue no. 817
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Hospitals facing hidden access-control problem as workforce turnover surges
The NHS has a particularly difficult security challenge because its buildings must remain open and accessible while managing a workforce that is constantly changing.
The latest workforce figures show more than 156,000 people leaving and 153,000 joining the Hospital and Community Health Services workforce in England in the year to May 2026. That represents hundreds of thousands of changes to staff access in just 12 months, before accounting for contractors, agency workers, volunteers and visitors.
Access control experts at ID Card Centre urge the industry that visitor management in healthcare cannot simply be treated as an IT or HR issue. There is a physical security implication every time someone's status changes.
A staff member leaving an organisation should mean their credentials are no longer valid. A contractor coming on site should be identifiable and restricted to the areas they actually need to access. An agency worker should be recognisable to colleagues even if they are unfamiliar with the individual.
The challenge is that hospitals are unusually difficult environments in which to achieve this. There are multiple entrances, 24-hour emergency access, large numbers of third-party workers and a constant flow of patients and visitors.
This isn't only a national workforce statistics issue, but it plays out in day-to-day badge issuance too. Production data for hospital-issued healthcare ID cards over the past three years shows order volumes falling by around 37%, from 478 orders in the first 12 months of the period to 303 in the most recent 12 months, even as staff turnover has stayed near record levels. Whatever the explanation, fewer replacement cards needed, delays in reissuing credentials, or genuine gaps opening up in coverage, the trend illustrates how quickly a process that isn't actively managed can drift out of step with the workforce it's meant to serve.
Managing Director at ID Card Centre, Ben O’Brien, said, “Hospitals don't have a technology problem, they have a consistency problem. Nearly a third of a million people moved through the NHS workforce last year alone, and yet the number of ID cards being issued has actually fallen. That gap is where risk lives, and it's also where the opportunity is. Getting identification right doesn't require a bigger budget or a new system, it requires treating it as a live process rather than a box that gets ticked once. The hospitals that get ahead of this now will be the ones setting the standard everyone else follows.”
Recent reports of individuals allegedly impersonating healthcare workers demonstrate why this matters. A convincing uniform or badge can create an assumption of legitimacy, but visible identification should be the endpoint of a much wider verification process not the verification itself.
For hospital estates, facilities and security teams, the answer isn't necessarily to introduce more complicated technology. In many cases, the bigger opportunity is to make existing processes more consistent.
Every person entering a hospital should be clearly identifiable, with different categories of staff, contractors and visitors immediately distinguishable. Credentials should be linked to appropriate access permissions, visitor passes should have defined periods of validity, and leavers should be removed from systems promptly.
The important thing is to treat identification as a process rather than a piece of plastic.
When hundreds of thousands of people are joining and leaving the NHS workforce each year, small inconsistencies in how identities are issued, displayed and deactivated can quickly become a significant operational and security risk.
https://www.idcardcentre.co.uk/
2nd September 2026