Consultant psychiatrist remains in critical condition
Dr Ananth Pullela, 55, received multiple stab wounds and was transferred from the Mid-Western Regional Hospital to Cork University Hospital when his condition deteriorated.
His family are maintaining a bedside vigil.
The attack happened at St Anne’s day hospital at Roxboro Road and a man appeared in court yesterday in connection with the incident.
A colleague, consultant psychologist Dr Catherine Burns, 64, who was also stabbed in the attack, was allowed home last night from the Mid-Western Regional Hospital.
Dr Pullela, who was born in India in 1952 is an internationally regarded forensic psychiatrist who specialises in treating dangerous mentally ill people.
He qualified in medicine in 1977 and then moved to New Zealand.
Eight years later he was head-hunted by the Australian justice department and moved there to work with notorious serial sex offenders and paedophiles.
He left the justice department after his contract was not renewed when there was a change of government.
The Government there came in for huge criticism from health professionals and the media over the manner in which he was dealt with.
His work earned him a fellowship from the New Zealand and Australian Colleges of Psychiatry.
He moved to this country with his family and began working with the health service in 2006.
As a forensic psychiatrist he deals with disturbed prisoners in Limerick prison.
The prison service had up to then failed to get a locally based psychiatrist to work in the prison and prisoners needing psychiatric supervision were looked after by visiting psychiatrists who had to travel from Dublin and other parts of the country.
He deals with most of his patients at St Anne’s, which is a modern facility.
Dr Pullela lives with his wife near Newport, Co Tipperary, and they have three grown-up children.
He is highly regarded by professionals in the psychiatric field and is described as being very friendly and kind to patients and colleagues.
Dr Catherine Burns is known as Kathleen to her colleagues and she is a former nun.
A native of Limerick, she was born in 1943.
She lives at Oak Lane, Kilteragh, Dooradoyle.
She is said to be a very conscientious professional who is totally dedicated to caring for her patients.
Even yesterday as she recovered at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital she was busy on the phone re-arranging appointments for her patients at St Anne’s.
Assaults on psychiatric staff:
* 1993: Three psychiatric nurses are stabbed — one in the heart, one in the lung and one in the arm — by a patient as they try to coax him to return to St Ita’s Hospital in Portrane on July 9, 1993. The patient had gone AWOL earlier that week.
* September 2006: Consultant psychiatrist Dr Michael McDonough is stabbed in the abdomen by an outpatient he was treating in his office at St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin.
It is understood the attacker used a five-inch blade, which severed one of Dr McDonough’s arteries.
* March 2006: Two former patients of Lakeview Acute Psychiatric Unit at Naas General Hospital return to the unit and threaten to kill four psychiatric nurses with a butcher’s knife unless they get down on their knees and beg for mercy. The men, armed with a double-bladed knife, broke through reinforced glass panels to gain access to the ward, after breaking into the unit via an upstairs door.
* January 2008: A patient attending St Anne’s Psychiatric Day Care Centre in Limerick stabs two consultant psychiatrists, leaving one fighting for his life. The two were holding a clinic when the man, Anthony McMahon, who had attended the clinic earlier that day, returned with a knife and repeatedly lunged at them.
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