What will happen if doctors can’t use WhatsApp?

On 13 March 2020 an intensive care specialist sent out a 15 point warning to doctors about the arrival of covid-19: “You will not recognise or prepare fast enough for the sudden influx of critically ill patients, and they will keep coming. Do not underestimate the imminent demise in [patients] . . . very rapid demise . . . 2 metres apart in canteen, stagger breaks. Once you see community spread . . . all health staff wear masks.”

Hundreds of NHS staff received these instructions, which were first prepared by a US doctor on the advice of an intensive care specialist in Lombardy, Italy. The warning wasn’t delivered by official memo, a team pep talk, or NHS email. It came through WhatsApp.

Mike Grocott, professor of anaesthesia and critical care medicine at the University of Southampton, was a member of four NHS related WhatsApp groups at the time, some with the maximum number of members. He remembers seeing valuable, probably lifesaving, advice about intubation and the possible symptoms or risks arising daily.

In March 2020 as the pandemic took hold, NHS England, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the National Data Guardian, and NHS Digital officially allowed clinicians to use messaging services such as WhatsApp “where the benefits outweighed the risk”—reversing years of caution about their use in patient care—provided that the apps used encryption.1 NHS England latest advice from December 2022 continues that policy, advising healthcare workers to use two step verification and to disable message notifications on the lock screen.2

And yet two recent pieces of legislation—one passed, one pending—threaten the use of any end-to-end encrypted messaging (see box) in the …