Home-grown clinic succeeds in filling needs
By Eloise Aguiar
Advertiser Windward O'ahu Writer
WAIMANALO — Ten years ago, the Waimanalo Health Center opened in a single building with two examination rooms and about 100 adult patients.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
Today, more than 4,000 people from inside and outside the community — including some from the Mainland — use the facility, whose scope of services goes beyond healing the body.
At the Waimanalo Health Center, from left, pediatric nurse Anita Pahinui-Nakamura, Dr. Noelani J. Apau and executive director Kawahine Kamakea-Ohelo serve more than 4,000 people.
This one-stop shop now consists of four buildings and two trailers where clients can get food, childcare, car seats, school supplies, health education, referrals and a myriad of medical treatments, including preventive care.
It also has become a community leader in areas ranging from Hawaiian culture to the environment. Among them:
- The center is connected to programs that help children learn to read, and provides mentors.
- It was instrumental in bringing the Weinberg Village for homeless to the community.
- It led efforts to clean and replant Waimanalo streams.
- It provides Hawaiian healing practices through its Ai Kupele Program.
- And it operates a clinic where teenagers can get services confidentially.
"It's reflective of what this community is," said Kawahine Kamakea-Ohelo, the executive director. "We try to provide not just the aloha, but the convenience."
The state Department of Health had been running a maternal and child care clinic in Waimanalo for 22 years when the health center set up in February 1992, said Loretta Fuddy, deputy director of the department.
That September, the center took over Department of Health responsibilities with the goal of providing broader medical service, said Fuddy, who was chief of the Maternal Child Health Branch during the transition.
"The community really pulled this together," she said of the grass-roots effort. "It was not another health organization coming in and moving it forward."
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
The effort was spearheaded by Kamakea-Ohelo, a high school graduate with a history of Hawaiian activism. She was raised poor and grew up wondering why services for the needy weren't all in one place.
The 10-year-old clinic on Kalaniana'ole Highway includes four buildings and two trailers.
From the start, she wanted to provide a gamut of services, and received help from providers including Drs. Charman Akina and H. William Goebert Jr., who worked at the clinic as volunteers for three to five years; Frank Kawaikapuokalani Hewett, director of cultural health and a Hawaiian health practitioner; and Greig Gaspar, the clinic's marketing specialist, who saw a need for a teen clinic that offered services discreetly.
Gaspar said that when he arrived in 1996, a nurse practitioner told him April always brought a huge number of pregnancy tests, because the carnival, the town's biggest event, is held in March. Some 400 women were tested that year.
As the adolescent health coordinator, Gaspar felt a need to take action. That same year, he opened the Teen Health Back Door Clinic, which treats and educates youths and provides condoms, a controversial move that had parents in an uproar.
But with children sexually active as young as 12, "we had to address that issue," he said.
Seven years later, the number of people seeking pregnancy tests after carnival has dropped to 12. "We know education works," he said.
The future of the center includes a plan to take its services to Hau'ula by the end of the year, though it has yet to find an appropriate site and may set up trailers.
For the long term, the center has a master plan spelling out its dreams to expand, become more self-reliant and bring more job opportunities to the community in the field of wellness, Kamakea-Ohelo said.
"Regardless of what we want for our patients, if they are not working they cannot afford the appropriate food or provide for their kids," she said.
Reach Eloise Aguiar at eaguiar@honoluluadvertiser.com or 234-5266.
