Posted on: Monday, September 15, 2003

EDITORIAL
Kane'ohe hospital continues to fall short

It's with decidedly mixed feelings that we hear Chief U.S. District Judge David Ezra say that the Hawai'i State Hospital has made "dramatic" progress in the last six months.

We're surely pleased that the hospital, at Kane'ohe, no longer has the reputation of a Third World snakepit.

But we're frustrated that the job isn't finished yet — after a dozen years of federal oversight.

"It is a substantially safer environment than it was several years ago," Ezra said. "Are we where we should be yet? No."

Lest anyone forget, the feds didn't journey to sunny Hawai'i to confer honors on the folks running the hospital — or our prisons or the so-called "Felix class" of public-school children, for that matter. They were here because local citizens despaired of state officials ever correcting the appalling conditions they had encountered.

In 1999, an angry Judge Ezra was all but shaking state lawmakers by the lapels to get them to cough up the right amount of money for the long-troubled hospital. If they didn't, he warned, he'd start seizing state assets and selling them to raise the money.

At the time, Ezra was clear in blaming the Legislature, not Gov. Ben Cayetano or his health director, Bruce Anderson, "or the good people working under him." It was all about the money.

Anderson was able to reduce the financial needs of the institution by reducing the size of the patient load. In step with the latest philosophy for handling the institutionalized mentally ill, he sent a number of individuals to community-based facilities with treatment programs tailored to their needs.

In fact, Anderson favored closing the hospital altogether, but settled for reducing patient numbers by almost one-third.

One way to reduce that population that Ezra refused to countenance, however, was the hospital's rather astonishing tendency to allow its patients to wind up in jail or prison.

U.S. Magistrate Kevin Chang, who is serving as the court-appointed special master overseeing the hospital's improvement plan, said the hiring of Dr. Rupert Goetz was important in bringing compliance closer.

But Ezra said outstanding concerns include patient and staff safety because of patients with violent criminal backgrounds, and a shortage of registered nurses.

We urge the state to redouble its efforts to satisfy Judge Ezra and bring this shameful chapter of Hawai'i history to an end.