As part of the registration process of newly qualified doctors, the General Medical Council (GMC) carries out physical ID checks throughout the year at UK medical schools. The current scale of this task is to manually ID check 7500 students in person across 34 medical schools (of which – some are foreign nationals). This is a lengthy process that can create dissatisfaction from medical students and has a cost impact on the GMC as extra people are required plus travel/ accommodation costs.

In order to explore alternative options for this part of the process, the GMC decided to investigate if a digital identity with GOV.UK Verify could replace this. Two days of user testing with medical students was undertaken to determine if a digital identity service could provide an easier registration journey and whether they would be comfortable to use it.

At the end of the project it was concluded that medical students would be comfortable to use GOV.UK Verify to replace physical ID checks as part of the GMC registration process. Many of the students felt that the use of GOV.UK Verify to replace physical ID checks would be a time-saving and easier way of completing identity verification, and that it would be a more efficient way for the identity verification to take place.

Learn about the results of this project in the White Paper.