WhatsApp Doc
This year London has had its fair share of major incidents with the Westminster and London Bridge attacks, and most recently the Grenfell fire. On these occasions we have activated our well thought out major incident plan, and each time analysed what went well, and what we could improve, and debriefed our teams.
At the final Westminster debrief there was some discussion about the use of our personal mobile phones and WhatsApp to improve communication within our teams. During the meeting I set up a WhatsApp group for the anaesthetic consultants for use only in major incidents – it took me two minutes, most of my colleagues were broadly supportive, a couple immediately left the group and a few others mentally rolled their eyes at yet another group that was going to ping on their phone and generally annoy them.
When I was woken by the major incident phone call at 3am on the 14th June I looked at my phone and there was already a lot of activity on the WhatsApp group, colleagues offering to come in, directions on where to report to and what needed doing. I looked out on our terrace and was met with an awful sight of West London lit up by the Grenfell fire.
Our hospital’s response to the fire was very well coordinated and effective, but I was particularly proud that the information sharing and general coordination of the anaesthetic department was second to none. Other teams looked on us with envy and the central coordination team was asking me for updates on how things were going. Anaesthetists are central in the treatment of any critically injured patient, and in the management of multiple casualties it is vital to have the anaesthetist and ODP/anaesthetic nurse in the right place. WhatsApp was absolutely central to this and made team coordination simple.
Despite being against most NHS information governance rules, WhatsApp is used routinely every day in the NHS for communication within teams. I’m glad to say that no patient identifiable information was shared in or Major Incident group but I know such information passes within clinical team WhatsApp groups up and down the country every single day. Is this a contravention of information governance principles? I would say no, as long as professional safeguards are applied.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the only way of viewing those messages is on the smartphones of the members of the group, and hacking into the messages is otherwise pretty much impossible, so security is dependent on the group members having encryption on their phones and treating the information they receive responsibly. Many of the concerns expressed about WhatsApp involve irresponsible behaviour – what if they share the information on social media? This would be no different to taking a set of notes and leaving it open in the hospital cafe for everyone to see, and contravenes the GMC’s excellent social media guidance.
Why doesn’t the NHS spend a lot of money on setting up its own social media platform to mirror WhatsApp where you can share patient data then? I would argue it would be a waste of money as the platform already exists and is already secure. In addition the NHS platform wouldn’t have the resources to be kept up to date with new operating system releases and would soon enough become less secure and more prone to attacks. Also, new, convenient features get added quickly to WhatsApp but would be extremely slow to get into any bespoke system.
So should the NHS embrace WhatsApp communication? I would say yes, but there needs to be guidance on it. It is the responsibility of healthcare professionals to treat that information confidentially and with respect, to have their phones encrypted and to delete information from groups after they move to a different job. We need to accept the reality of WhatsApp and all the benefits it brings us, but need to provide sensible safeguards on the way it is used, and to treat unprofessional social media behaviour in the same way as leaving a set of confidential notes on a park bench.
In the meanwhile, I hope my Major Incident WhatsApp group stays silent for a while now.