King's Health Partners Honorary Passports make cross-partnership working as simple as possible, freeing up time and resource for innovative research and patient care. 

Cross-partnership working is at the centre of all that we do at King’s Health Partners. The King’s Health Partners’ Honorary Passport was developed in 2010 to enable our staff to provide clinical services, education and training, and undertake research across our four partner organisations.

What does an Honorary Passport offer? 

The Honorary Passport is designed for those who work across multiple organisations within the partnership and their sites. The passport reduces the risk of duplication of paperwork and resource, setting up individual honorary arrangements with each partner organisation and ensuring that recruitment checks are in place for these staff. The passport also ensures observance of clinical governance on all the included sites. 

Honorary Passports allow permitted staff members to access sites across King’s Health Partners: this includes all sites for Guy’s & St Thomas’, (including Royal Brompton and Harefield following merger in 2021), King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts and King’s College London. 

The agreement recognises the de facto movement of staff across partner sites and legitimises cross-site working. 

By cutting down administrative processes, more time is made available for research and clinical work, helping to accelerate translational research and improve delivery of care for patients. 

How can I get one? 

For those working across King’s Health Partners, a KHP Honorary Passport Application Form must be completed by your primary employer (such as your line manager at the organisation you are employed by and that administers your pay) and issued by your HR Department. 

In order to start working across sites, you need endorsement from a senior designated officer at the host organisation where you will be working in an honorary capacity. From this point you will be carrying out duties on the host employer’s behalf, and therefore will be bound by their rules, policies and procedures. 

If you are not currently substantively employed by one of the organisations within the Honorary Passport agreement, including postgraduates, visitors and retired consultants, separate arrangements are currently in place. Contact your organisation’s HR team to learn about your options. 

If you are a manager and one of your team could benefit from an Honorary Passport, you can download the above form and forward it to your HR Department once completed. 

Alternatively, if you are unsure about your eligibility or need for an Honorary Passport, or want to know more about the benefits, you can check out our KHP Honorary Passport Frequently Asked Questions. 

This guidance is to remind all NHS and University staff working across our organisations, both on substantive and fixed term contracts, to obtain a King’s Health Partners’ (KHP) Honorary Passport in order to ensure they follow proper clinical governance across all sites. The principal changes were introduced in 2018 to support medical revalidation. 

Doctors are required to gain a signature from their Responsible Officer (RO) for revalidation purposes, to support their request for an honorary passport. This will both ensure that there is visibility of doctors carrying out work on the KHP sites and that doctors employed by the university have an identified RO. This will also enable ROs to carry out their roles more effectively. 

Doctors, as well as staff from other disciplines, will also require a host manager for any honorary assignments that they undertake. This might be a clinical lead, head of department or manager/senior manager for the department where the honorary work is taking place. The host manager will need to sign the back page of an individual’s passport to confirm that they are accountable for the honorary member of staff while they are on the host site. 

The King’s Health Partners’ Honorary Passport was created to allow staff working across our partner organisations the opportunity to develop clinical services, research, education and training without unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication of checks. 

Having an Honorary Passport means that if you are currently employed by one of King’s Health Partners’ organisations, you will have the correct authorisation to access systems, patient data and deliver clinical activity at another partner organisation. It will also allow you to undertake research within King’s Health Partners. 

The Honorary Passport is mandatory for staff working across our partner organisations and it is issued by your substantive/primary employer within KHP. If you are providing clinical services, undertaking research or providing education and training across King’s Health Partners’ trusts, you will need to request a passport using the honorary passport request form and submit it to the HR department where you are employed for issue of the document. It is your responsibility to ensure that you hold the passport prior to commencing your honorary assignment on another partner (host) site. 

The passport will require you to contact your host manager to sign and approve the document before you start the work. Staff undertaking research across the College and our trusts may also be covered by the King’s Health Partners’ Honorary Passport. 

If you are looking to undertake multi-centre research outside of our organisations, please contact your local R&D department for details or visit Research passport - Health Research Authority.

All documents can be located on the HR pages of your employer’s intranet site. Those staff who already hold a passport do not need a new version, however doctors do have a mandatory requirement to adhere to revalidation requirements to work on partner sites. 

For more information about the Honorary Passport, please contact your local HR team.