Limerick Person of the Month: Top consultant and frontline worker applauded for hard-hitting Covid warnings

ONE of the country's top intensive care consultants has been named the Limerick Person of the Month for not alone her Trojan work on the frontline during the Covid-19 pandemic but also for the manner in which she articulated powerful warnings to the general public on the dangers of not taking the virus seriously.

Dr Catherine Motherway, a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care at University Hospital Limerick first came to the wider public’s attention in the early weeks of the pandemic when she painted a sobering picture of what lay ahead if the virus wasn’t kept under control. 

“This is a virus. We know it’s near us. We know it’s in every county in Ireland. We know that if we don’t control the surge we will have a major problem coping,” she told RTE Prime Time presenter David McCullagh on March 19 2020.

“There is seriously no healthcare service that could cope with what Italy has just gone through or indeed Wuhan in China.

“We have a limited amount of beds and we have been working very hard in the past number of weeks to try and increase the capacity.”

Dr Motherway warned the nation that “essentially, we must treat each other like pariahs”. 

“That is what we have to do. All of us. It is a real change for us but we need to do that to prevent what has happened in Italy happening here.”

Dr Motherway, who is the immediate Past President of the Intensive Care Society of Ireland accepted the Limerick Person of the Month award this week on behalf of all her colleagues who have worked tirelessly with her at UHL over the past 12 months. The Limerick Person of the Month award is jointly sponsored by the Limerick Leader, media agency Southern and the Clayton Hotel.

“I’m actually speechless. I’m just doing my job,” smiled the modest consultant who hails from Ladysbridge in County Cork and now resides in Ballinasloe, County Galway.

“This is definitely a team effort involving everyone, from the nurses, doctors, porters, cleaners, paramedics, physiotherapists, speech and language therapists and all of the other specialities - everyone combined. We can’t do this without the entire team. It takes a huge effort by everybody to save lives in intensive care.

“By the time you get to us you are sicker than sick and we do our level best to get you better.”

In UHL at the very beginning of the pandemic there were 10 ICU beds and eight HDU beds. There are now 12 ICU beds and 10 HDU beds.

“There are two consultants on during the day with a team of about four to five other doctors and a team of nursing staff with physios,” she explained. “I have all of the patients on the Level One floor today - the ICU floor, and my colleagues saw the patients on the HDU floor and then we come together and we discuss difficult cases and organise transfers to hospitals depending on what the patients need.

“We also organise organ support. Sometimes you would spend a lot of time with one particular patient if they were having a very big problem.” 

While the numbers presenting with Covid-19 have reduced, according to Dr Motherway “we still have a lot of young, sick patients in the ICUs around the country”.

“Once you get this disease really badly, it’s quite a challenge in the intensive care setting for the patients and their families,” she said.

Around a third of ICU beds are being occupied by Covid patients.

The mother-of-two is continuing her plea to the public to adhere to the HSE advice as, she warns, “there is still a high level of the disease in the community”. 

“We want to provide non-Covid related healthcare and to do that we need there to be very little Covid in the hospital setting. The people are doing their best with the vaccination schedule - the HSE is in fairness delivering vaccine as we get it and it’s important as well that the vaccine is delivered worldwide equitably to all countries, not just those of us who live in the rich part of the world, because if we don’t vaccinate the whole world, new variants will develop in places where viral transmission is not controlled and it will come back to bite us in a prolonged pandemic”.

Dr Motherway is married to Christopher Curley, a Galway man, and the couple have two children, Ciarán and Aoife Curley. 

On a final note she paid tribute to the wider public for their support over the  past year with some going the extra mile to lift the spirits of frontline staff.

“The public have been so good,” she acknowledged. “They have been sending us food and gifts and lovely letters and notes. It’s been an entire community effort - an entire world effort even.”