Linkin Post from Tom Oakley15 Feb 2024 15:43
An insightful article from Digital Health around the impending end of WhatsApp use by clinicians, however ending the use of WhatsApp isn't pointless it's imperative.
The article is right on a number of fronts; especially that an effective replacement for WhatsApp will need widespread adoption across the NHS and that this will need central coordinated commissioning support from NHS England.
One thing that does need challenging in the article is the focus on preventing government access to clinicians' messages.
Whilst I appreciate the issue more broadly the main concern, in relation to healthcare, is that WhatsApp prevents NHS Trusts from seeing chat content.
When this relates to care decisions for patients it means that the clinical conversation, and the decisions reached, don't form part of the patient record. What's more, messages can be deleted. This makes it impossible for the Trust to meet its CQC obligations to maintain a contemporaneous record for the patient and to meet their legal obligations as a data controller under GDPR. It also makes it very difficult for patients to challenge care decisions when things go wrong or for Doctors to defend themselves in malpractice cases.
Decisions about patient care shouldn't be happening in a vacuum, they must link back to the patient's record. WhatsApp doesn't integrate with EPR and Trusts can't compel the information from the platform. Using it for clinical discussions results in key information being held in siloes on individual clinicians' phones, it potentially leads to multiple versions of the truth and can result in key information being missed by the wider team, conceivably resulting in patient harm. This is why dedicated apps like Bleepa exist, with appropriate levels of security and integration, to protect everyone involved, clinicians, employing Trusts and most importantly patients.
Asynchronous collaboration through chat messages is definitely the way forward, trust me as a clinician myself I know, but we should be using dedicated, appropriately certified and regulated tools and it is the responsibility of NHS leadership to make such tools available, at scale for frontline teams.
Bleepa has been the only fully compliant comms platform available in the UK since its launch in 2019 and we welcome the increasing awareness that clinical colleagues need a viable replacement to WhatsApp, it's why we created the product. Bleepa has resulted in a 74% reduction in referral response time at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust, so collaboration through chat definitely works, clinicians just need the right tool.
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