WhatsApp’ening in Orthopaedic TrainingA Cross-sectional Survey Assessing the Effectiveness in Communication between Orthopaedic Trainees in North-west United Kingdom Deanery

Introduction: The North West Orthopaedic Trainees Association (NWOTA) WhatsApp group is a group set-up by the orthopaedic trainees and has been running for a number of years, distributing a wide range of information to orthopaedic residents within the North-west of England region.

Aim: To look at the aspects of multimedia communication within the WhatsApp group.

Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional survey research was Knowledge, Attitude and Behaviour (KAB) study, which assessed the various aspects of information posted within the NWOTA group via a questionnaire over a one month period in April 2020. The questionnaire was split into different domains of information posted within the group, and the residents were asked to rate the usefulness of this type of information from 1-10, with 10 being the most useful. The data collected was anonymised. A mann-whitney U test was used to statistically analyse the results for significance. Microsoft excel version 16.16.27 was used to calculate the results.

Results: Fifty-five trainees, out of a total of 63, within the deanery responded, with an average experience of 3.4 years working as a specialist registrar. The highest scoring topics were updates on unofficial announcements such as, social events (mean score of 8.27), journal club advertising (8.24), and updates on deanery teaching (7.98). The topics scoring lowest were updates from more official announcements such as updates from the Training Programme Director (TPD) (6.24), updates on training (6.55) and finding out on-call registrars in different hospitals (7.16). Statistical analysis using the mann-whitney U-test confirmed a significant difference (p-value<0.05) in responses, when assessing the association between each combination of variables, the significant differences were seen in the extreme scoring variables that scored particularly high or low.

Conclusion: The results showed that the orthopaedic trainees find WhatsApp to be a useful channel of communication for more unofficial announcements rather than official updates. With the advancements within social media and the increasing use of mobile phones, this may be an area for potential improvements within residency communications to improve speciality training.