Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 6, Number 2, 1 February 1989 — Waiʻanae Health Clinic Grows With Its Community [ARTICLE]

Waiʻanae Health Clinic Grows With Its Community

by Deborah Lee Ward Editor, Ka Wai Ola O OHA From its inception 20 years ago through grassroots organizing efforts, the growth of the Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center parallels in many ways the growth of the entire Wai'anae coast community.

Incorporated in 1969 through a community initiative for readily accessible medical care, it has emerged as the major health facility of 0'ahu's western shore. It continues to provide improved services and to introduce new ones to meet eommunity needs, the better to stay competitive as other health care providers open on the Wai'anae coast. Not only has the Wai'anae elinie grown steadily in its services to coast residents, it now serves as a model for community health centers being developed in several Pacific island nations.

According to WCCHC program director Richard Bettini, "We are now a privately-owned $7 million corporation that employs up to 250 fulltime, part-time and on-eall employees." Most of its staff are hired from the Wai'anae coast community. Bettini added, "Ten years ago we were 60 percent federally funded, but now we get most of our funding from generated revenues." The Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center is operated by the Wai'anae District Comprehensive Health and Hospital Board, ine., a private nonprofit corporation established in 1969. It is one of several community services — such as regular TheBus service, a day care center, and a credit union — that sprang out of the Model Cities Pro-

gram of the late 1960s and early 1970s from eommunity initiatives. By 1973 the first WCCHC structure, an emergency building, was under construction. The administration office was located in Maili, and the first elinie physician practiced in an office across Luke Realty. In September that year, the new building opened to outpatient services.

T oday the center consists of five buildings at its hillside location above Farrington Highway, and four others below at the old fire station site. In 1988 the center marked its 15th year of providing medieal services to coast residents. It serves residents of the Wai'anae coast from Ka'ena point to Makakilo, including the communities of Honokai Hale, Nanakuli, Maili, Wai'anae and Makaha. The basic philosophy of the corporation is to provide quality health services to community residents regardless of their ability to pay. A new, larger central reception area was completed in December 1988. It provides new specialty elinie space and a triage area. To meet this challenge, the WCCHC nowoffers many programs:

• Preventive health services directed by Dr. Terry Shintani (who is also nutrition columnist for Ka Wai Ola O OHA), including: Malama Ola, a healthy lifestyle education program; and a diabetes health support group whieh meets regularly to leam and share ways to handle diet and medication in the home. • Nutritional services, including the Women and Infant Care federal program whieh provides food supplements for expectant mother considered at medical "risk" due to use of drugs, aleohol, nicotine, poor nutrition, laek of prenatal care,

and other health conditions; • The first sex abuse treatment program available on the Wai'anae coast; • Adult daycare whieh provides private duty nurses.

• Outpatient/emergency care, laboratory/xray, physical therapy department and visiting specialists in obstetrics/gynecology, orthopedics, ear/nose/throat specialist, and psychiatry. For the past several years, WCCHC has provided technical and consulting services to health eenters and hospitals in Micronesia, Belau, the Northern Marianas, South Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Pohnpei. The elinie now has contracts with center in Belau, Saipan and Guam to teach their staff how to provide health services, and about operating systems in a community health center.

A team went to Pohnpei in 1986 to train loeal staff, evaluate systems and make recommendations. Last year 17 minicomputers were purchased for health centers by the Trust Territory government. Now there is a Pohnpei community health center, an arm of the hospital. The Pohnpei health center provides primary care and is trying to change the island's focus on health to preventive awareness.

Seeing the progress these Pacific health centers are making reminds WCCHC assistant administrator Mananne Glushenko, of the growth she has personally witnessed at the Wai'anae elinie during her 15 years there. Yet Glushenko ean see a continuing need back home as she and other staff make their plans to meet that challenge.