Kula Hospital was home to more than 100 long-term patients when severe flooding and rain in March damaged the facility.
“We saw nearly 50 inches of rain in a very short period of time,” said Wade Ebersole, interim CEO of Maui Health, which operates the hospital and other facilities, including Maui Memorial Hospital. “There was pretty significant water penetration into the building.”
The Kula facility served as a nursing home with 105 beds allocated for long-term care, specialized care for those with intellectual disabilities, and emergency room services for the Upcountry community.
As floodwater entered the historic five-story hospital, patients were shuffled to dry portions of the building. Soon, a national assessment team came to inspect the hospital. They determined it was not safe, and within a week of the storm, Ebersole said patients were relocated.
“It was really difficult — we take our commitment to the Upcountry community very seriously, and so this was not a decision that we took lightly,” Ebersole said. “The decisions that we make, we always put through the lens of what is the safest and best thing for our patients.”
Fifty-five long-term care patients were transferred to Kīhei, where Maui Health is leasing space in an unoccupied healthcare building. Others moved to a converted wing of Maui Memorial. And some were flown to facilities on O’ahu.
A small medical clinic on the property was “surprisingly unimpacted by the flood,” said Ebersole, and it remains open.
Community Impacts
“We did our very best to try to keep these residents and these patients as close to home as possible,” explained Ebersole. He said many of the patients with intellectual disabilities did go to O’ahu based on available care.
Maui Health told HPR in a statement, “placement decisions were made on an individual basis, guided by each resident’s clinical needs, level of care required, and the availability of appropriate beds.”
But families and loved ones of patients say they’ve been frustrated by the process.
Maui resident Lucienne de Naie is a caretaker and legal agent for a close friend who’d been at Kula Hospital since last July.
After the storm, her friend was transferred to Maui Memorial Medical Center in Wailuku. About a week later, de Naie learned she was being moved to O’ahu.
“The families were just heartbroken because when their loved one was at Kula Hospital, they could visit regularly, they could, you know, do little outings,” she said. “You just can't do that very easily when someone's on a different island.”
De Naie said she went from visiting her friend at Kula Hospital a few times a week to only a phone call since her transfer.
“I've talked to her on the phone once. It's hard to get through,” De Naie explained. “It's just very different than being able to go up and bring some fresh flowers from your yard and some bananas, and you know, catch up with the gossip.”
De Naie spoke highly of the nursing staff and level of care her friend received at Kula Hospital. But she’s disheartened by what she calls poor communication about patients, their future arrangements and the status of the hospital.
“Frustration over the lack of information, and then a deep sadness, it's like a wrenching away, especially after investing years in a friend, trying to get them in a safe situation, and then that safety net just is ripped away in one day,” she said.
Maui Health told HPR, “While we understand that this uncertainty is difficult, we want to reassure families and the community that we are actively evaluating multiple potential pathways forward and will provide updates as soon as new information becomes available.”
Work is underway
Back at Kula Hospital, Ebersole said assessments are in progress.
“We have started the remediation and restoration process, meaning we're going into certain areas and removing where the water penetrated and replacing it with safe materials,” he explained.
The future is still unclear.
“Everything that could have been impacted needs to be tested, assessed, and I think that we're pretty close to understanding what the full impact is, we're just not quite there yet,” said Ebersole.
‘Storied history’
Many describe Kula Hospital's grounds fondly.
“It's a magical place,” said Ebersole. “It's beautiful. It's got breathtaking views, and the staff that have been up there are really committed to that community.”
The facility itself has a long history spanning over a century. Kula Hospital was founded in 1910 as a tuberculosis sanitarium, and it eventually grew into a full-service general hospital. It had a surgical suite where medical students could be trained.
Dr. Jack Lewin, a former medical director at Kula Hospital, began working there in the 1980s.
“In those days, nurses lived in the nurses' cottage, doctors had houses there, and my wife and family and I lived in this beautiful home on the grounds, and just a wonderful pleasure to live there,” Lewin said.
He now heads the State Health Planning and Development Agency, helping guide the future of Hawai’i's healthcare.
He said along with long-term care, Upcountry residents have lost a vital resource in Kula Hospital.
“It also provides, for that relatively remote area, a full emergency room service and it has a backup capability of admitting patients, like an acute care hospital in a crisis,” he said.
While Maui Health operates the facility, the building and land is owned by the state, which said it is supporting Maui Health and its patients during the process.
“Kula Hospital's emergency department generally treated patients with lower-acuity medical needs,” said the state Department of Health in a statement to HPR. “Maui Memorial Hospital has since needed to absorb many of those services. Longer transport times have also reduced the availability of the ambulance unit stationed in Kula, and DOH is monitoring the situation to determine whether an additional ambulance unit may be needed.”
Uncertain future
Lewin said when he began working at Kula Hospital, he went to the Legislature to raise funds to renovate the hospital.
“This is going to be up to the Legislature ultimately to decide what to do, because it's going to involve more than the original renovation back in the '80s, which was an $8 million renovation — that was huge back then,” he said. “It's going to be more like $50 million today, if we were smart enough to make that move.”
He's pushing to make that investment.
“It's a great resource, and I hope we as a state choose to protect it and rehabilitate it again,” he said.
Though there's no certainty or timeline available yet, Maui Health confirmed they are “exploring multiple potential pathways to restore services at Kula Hospital.”
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