HOW DEPARTMENT LIKES TO ‘CORRECT’ PATIENT ADVOCATES ON THEIR TWEETS
PATIENT advocate Lorraine Walsh was contacted by the Department of Health to correct a tweet she published in her own account earlier this week.
Ms Walsh told the Irish Mail on Sunday that this was not the first time she and other patient advocates had been contacted by a department staff member with a view to ‘clarify’ their tweets.
Kate O’Flaherty, a principal officer with responsibilities over the screening service, called Ms Walsh after she retweeted an Irish Examiner journalist highlighting a story that Dr Gabriel Scally, who carried out a review of the screening service, was ‘dumped’ from the process to fix CervicalCheck.
Ms Walsh wrote: ‘Just left a CervicalCheck Steering Committee and it was not mentioned that Scally is no longer involved.’
Ms O’Flaherty called her very shortly after her tweet was published. Of the conversation, Ms Walsh said: ‘The department is keeping an eye on us all the time, so they rang me to clarify my tweet, even though I hadn’t actually said anything wrong in it. I just said this hadn’t been mentioned in the meeting, which was correct. So then they actually clarified that he hadn’t been dumped as the article had said. They told me he hadn’t been dumped, but he hadn’t been engaged by them.
‘So I said, “so the information in the article is in fact correct in that
you haven’t engaged him when way back Simon Harris said that Gabriel Scally would be overseeing the implementation of the plan”.’
Following the call, Ms Walsh tweeted a second time: ‘It would seem Gabriel Scally wasn’t “dumped”, he just wasn’t engaged.’
The MoS asked the department if it was common practice for it to contact members of the 221+ group to amend their tweets, including those that cast a negative light on the department.
A spokesman said: ‘Department of Health officials, as part of usual business, communicate with representatives of the 221+ Group, including in their capacity as members of the CervicalCheck Steering Committee.
‘Members, including the 221+ Group representatives, were updated as a courtesy of a statement issued by the department in response to an inaccurate suggestion regarding Dr Scally.’