| Training and Research |
“Another thing the CDQ staff here did was continuing training for community health agents. A WhatsApp group where they held meetings, talked about activities. There are also UFSCAR people who helped a lot, which are the training, research, and extension staff. In these groups, they discussed the role of the community agent, what they could do, monitoring and guiding them to seek health services” E3. |
| Interprofessional Communication |
“We lived the pandemic 24 hours a day within a WhatsApp group where notifications, CROSS files, patient status, were deposited… The sensitization, the commitment of the professionals, was thus outstanding. It made you wanna cry 24 hours a day. I cried and the girls cried to see the stories in that group, begging for a place inside a hospital, an ICU bed. It made you wanna cry” E3.
“At that same time, the protocols were already being changed by the CCIH, there were times when we changed the flow twice a day because of how much things changed, but everything that was changed we already went through in WhatsApp groups to speed up communication and for everyone to follow the same path” E5.
“Wow, my husband wanted to kill me! I said: how am I going to leave the girls without guidance? [...] Since we couldn’t meet anymore, I said: I’m going to set up a WhatsApp group. It was 24 hours a day of technical documents, downloading them from the internet, because there is a group of 60, 70 nurses [...] and there we disseminate all the guidance via email and WhatsApp because WhatsApp was something that is much easier to disseminate. WhatsApp was a very important factor, because among health professionals, all technical documentation was disseminated on WhatsApp” E6.
“They had a WhatsApp group that ended up doing the clinical management of the cases, the management of care!” E17.
“They would send a doctor’s report, summary, by email or WhatsApp, they had a group” E18.
“I have a sanitarian agent who understands this area of data collection [...] so, we, from the planning area, say: “you do this survey and you do this monitoring for us” and we put it on WhatsApp for everybody” E20. |
| Health Care |
“Monitoring happens daily to this day. An employee already passes on positive cases and, either by phone or WhatsApp, she monitors them. If they notice any alarm signs, then the patient is already instructed to look for the unit or the physician will go to the residence if necessary [...] she calls or she sends a WhatsApp message: ‘So-and-so, are you okay? How are you? Is there anyone else in your house like that?’ She herself already has the freedom to talk to the team or to the nurse or to the physician: ‘Doctor, so-and-so is feeling this, this, and that, what do you doctor think, should we ask her to come here?’ The workers themselves will get in touch with a patient: ‘Ms. Mary, the doctor is waiting for you here, the ambulance is coming to pick you up’. That reflected a lot on our aid, it really reduced the need for transfers” E4.
“One issue that the CHA brought up is that many ended up listening on WhatsApp and did not go to have a dialogue, to talk. It was a way for them to leave this bond strengthened, having this other way of relating” E6.
“During the pandemic, everything stopped. They did one or another individual care at the CAPSs [center for psychosocial care], no longer group care. Due to COVID, it was remote service, WhatsApp service, video call service” E7.
“We also had this unique characteristic in mental health. We created a channel for patients. There was a WhatsApp group in which people could send messages and our professional contacted these people, gave them the necessary assistance [...] Vulnerable people or with a mental disorder, we follow these cases very closely, throughout the pandemic period by WhatsApp 24 hours a day. No! 36 hours a day!” E26. |
| Loss of visibility |
Verbatim |
| Health Management |
“This makes a big difference, a regulation forum WhatsApp group, countless conversations all day long [...] the commitment of everyone and the presence of providers on a regular basis to listen to both what the State has to say, and what the municipalities are putting in” E1.
“It’s such a basic instrument, a GT COVID group on WhatsApp [...] we put the form, ‘look, there’s such a case, there’s I don’t know what’, so I said: ‘no, ask to direct it here and I’ll attend or even I’ll ask for help in other DRS’ [...] I said: ‘I’m going to set up a WhatsApp group’ because I didn’t have the telecoms yet. The disclosure took place by e-mail and WhatsApp [...] Our WhatsApp group worked Saturdays, Sundays, there was no day off [...] there are the CIR groups. We are in all of these CIR groups, then we publicize it in the CIR, publicize it in the TG, publicize it in the surveillance group and there is the regulation forum, which are all the hospitals and all the managers as well!” E3.
“We have a WhatsApp group; it was all virtual. So, at the time, we have a WhatsApp group of managers [...] We even had a few meetings but most of them were handled virtually, a WhatsApp group with mayors and managers basically” E4.
“The technical part, it was everything in the CIR that we solved, including, on WhatsApp, there was a group of ours, which has the group of managers to this day” E5.
“The COE group was active and necessary for information to arrive faster, right? We already had the WhatsApp group, and I guarantee that many lives were saved in the face of this network, because a network was formed [...] this solidarity among everyone, even because we were diving into the unknown [...] all this discussion was only on WhatsApp or in Zoom meetings [...] the great gain we had in this pandemic was to use these tools. How it made everything quicker! It made everything quicker and tortured us, you know, because, I’ll tell you something: it’s 24 hours, right? [...] before you attended a meeting, it was the whole day, you went there in São Paulo, you have all the commuting, then the coming back. Now, you’re in a meeting there, that’s over, you were in another one [...] you optimized a lot of things, but it overloaded” E6.
“They also needed public security to keep up with the vaccines [...] so we got the commander, made a WhatsApp group” E6.
“Our management asked everyone to participate. All employees were included in the WhatsApp group. But if the person didn’t want to participate, didn’t want to be in the group, they weren’t obligated. She was included, but she was free to leave the group at any time” E7.
“We had a regulation WhatsApp group. A patient would arrive with a really serious case, who was unable to stay there in the support: ‘Look, we need to squeeze them in, this patient doesn’t have the clinical conditions to stay here’. Then we would go and start making this other regulation, asking for priority, in the case of the patient, among the managers of this DRS [...] we did it through CROSS, but on WhatsApp we had a faster response” E8.
“So we set up a WhatsApp group. We received the information; we had meetings in the morning, in the afternoon and at night. With each new information that came, we called on the WhatsApp group to hold meetings, we had Zoom meetings, which we learned, we had to learn how to move, how to work with him” E16.
“Through social media, WhatsApp, that whole thing: when it’s going to be released, when it’s not, we’re supposed to stay home, we’re not supposed to stay home [...] public transport, mandatory masks” E22.
“It was a committee to cope with COVID-19. All the problems that appeared, the complications, went to the committee. We were practically gathered at the end of the day in the living room and also by WhatsApp” E26. |
| Loss of visibility |
Verbatim |
| Health Management |
“We listed that these three areas would be important: Surveillance, Assistance at the municipal level, and hospitals here in the region. So, we quickly made a WhatsApp group. At the moment when the regulation did not cope, the group became a solidary thing so the municipalities with the most difficulties could say in the group: ‘Guys, for God’s sake, I need help!’ And then: ‘I’m with someone like that…’, even described the case and a hospital that had a vacancy at that time said: ‘You can send them here’. It wasn’t an institutionalized thing, but it was something that was being composed in that way at that time [...] The WhatsApp group remains, but it’s silent, I think if the scenario continues the way it’s happening, maybe it will come back” E27.
“The conversation is very continuous between us and the municipalities. As they sometimes also come to get supplies, death certificates, vaccines, they go up and knock on our door, they come in and talk to us, outside the phone, outside the WhatsApp group [...] you notice that you send an email and say in the group: ‘Check the email we sent’. Then, they don’t respond by email, but on WhatsApp immediately. So then they start in the group to discuss, they start asking what they’re going to do and what they’re not going to do. [...] for better or for worse, this WhatsApp has sped up information and discussions, but just like that, you leave here at 6 o’clock in the afternoon, no one cares, the groups continue [...] We get along very well, we have formal contact between GVE and the municipalities and we have personal contacts. We have everybody’s phone number, we have WhatsApp groups that we continued to implement, they have been creating more humanization, of this, of that, responding very well [...] Then he would say: ‘Guys, I need this here…’, and we said: ‘Waiting for the batch, the batch information’ [...] we already have the immunization WhatsApp group as well, so in this group: ‘Look, there’s going to be vaccine on that date…’ [...] already put the batch, the amount that each municipality will receive, if it has the D1, D2 dose, all those things. Distribute it to the group and set an appointment to pick it up” E28.
“The bulletin was an initiative of ours because we realized the need since the news traveled much faster on social media, and then we realized that we had this delay in information and it was not an epidemiological profile of sustained information to support decision-making. So we decided to make this bulletin, it started from here, from the official information that we had in the bank and it was made available by email and WhatsApp” E28. |
Use of WhatsApp® aplicattion in health manegement, work, and care in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic