I'd say you should be ashamed of yourself for this tweet but you've obviously no shame.

You're trying to allege a secretive, nefarious HSE directive not to transport nursing home residents to a hospital.

As usual, you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. https://twitter.com/paddycosgrave/status/1249421561221824514

1. General public have *zero* 'right to know' what care plans are in nursing homes. Residents and their families have every right to know, and all nursing homes would have informed families, the rest of us do not.

How someone's grandfather is treated is none of your business.

2. The overwhelming majority of nursing home patients do not want to die in a hospital. The amount of residents who survive a transfer to an acute hospital setting is understandably not high. Anywhere from 35-60% don't survive. Of the ones who do, ~40% of them die within 30 days.

3. In normal times, amount of nursing home residents with cognitive impairment transferred to an ICU ranges from 0.5% to 12% depending on clinical factors. Typically palliative care is deemed more appropriate and more in line with their wishes to die in a comfy, familiar place.

4. The risks of admission to hospital:

-Acquiring an infection
-Trauma of transportation
-Heightened stress and agitation

Often outweigh the benefits of any clinical intervention.

Transporting an 87-year-old with dementia and stage 4 cancer to an ICU would be cruelty.

5. There is no country on Earth for whom automatic transfer of all nursing home patients to acute hospital settings is POLICY (see I can put it in caps for dramatic effect too). Open to correction but have spent hours trying to find a single country with this policy. None.

6. The implied messaging of your tweet is we are leaving frail, old people to just die without even trying to help them.

It's a shameful insult to our healthcare professionals to suggest we wouldn't bother our hole to try save people who would benefit from ICU intervention.

You complain about "spin" non-stop yet have managed to spin this into something nefarious sounding by using "moles", "sources", "CAPS FOR EFFECT".

What did you even need a "mole" for?

They wrote an article in the Irish Times detailing all of this last week. It was no secret.

The HSE are dealing with a once-in-a-generation crisis. Everyone from Paul Reid at the top to a hospital porter wheeling a patient is flat-out trying to keep people safe and save people's lives.

No crisis response can ever be perfect but they're doing their absolute best.

What you're doing in recent weeks is your absolute best to distress and alarm people, with false allegations and spinning things into conspiracies.

Your pinned tweet from 9 days ago says "I'm bowing out".

I thought that meant you were gonna shut the fuck up.