Opinion Articles

LIVES ARE AT STAKE: LET'S PULL TOGETHER
by Joe Pluta, President, West Maui Taxpayers Association

With lives at stake, it's time to set the record straight on the key issue of bringing emergency health care to 50,000 residents and visitors who live or stay in West Maui. Medical experts say survival rates for heart attacks and strokes increase dramatically when victims reach a full-service hospital within the so-called golden hour. For more than four years, the West Maui Taxpayers Assn. has laid the groundwork for just such a full-service hospital, obtaining a definitive land donation from Ka'anapali Development Corp, completing the necessary environmental impact and other studies and securing pledges of support from county officials.

Thanks to our many donors who have provided seed money, we are ready to go. We are now launching a "Golden Hour Fund" campaign with the goal of raising $4-million, the first $480,000 of which will help us complete architectural drawings and apply for $30-$40 million HUD funding and approval of a State Certificate of Need.(This follows our previous success of raising $6.5 million to build a fire station in Napili in 1992).

Meanwhile, Maui Memorial Medical Center and Maui Land & Pineapple Co. earlier this month announced a hastily put together proposal to create a $ 5-million facility to provide elderly care and "emergency services." This initiative leaves the confusing impression that Maui Pine's participation insures that we will get a hospital. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Just a few words-acute emergency care and emergency services frame the debate. The taxpayer association backed West Maui Hospital in Lahaina,--center of our West Side resident and resort population--focuses on full-service acute emergency care. In acute emergency care, critical patients are stabilized and then treated on site.

The necessary doctors and medical staff are available 24/7 to perform many needed procedures, including surgery. Again, this is a full-service hospital. On the other hand, the focus of the Maui Memorial/Maui Pine medical facility would be elderly care with all beds devoted to longer term stays.

A secondary function, as we interpret the first announcement, would be emergency services to stabilize patients before transport to Maui Memorial. The acute emergency care would still be provided at Maui Memorial in Kahalui, a minimum 66-minute trip by ambulance from the West Side.

What we have proposed is a hospital. Maui Memorial's West Side facility would be for long term care with a very small holding area for acute patients to be sent to Kahalui. The West Maui Taxpayers Assn. plan clearly deserves the widest possible community support not only in the form of financial contributions but in the form of letters to public officer holders, community leaders and lively public forums such as Maui News.

Today's Maui is far different from the Maui of just a few years ago. And it is time for us to face facts. Health care on Maui has long suffered from lack of competition, with Maui Memorial the only hospital. On a personal note, I have had the experience of an emergency ambulance ride to Maui Memorial and the agony of waiting several hours there in a packed emergency room before treatment.

The administrators of Maui Memorial are good people doing the best they can. They are, however, failing to bring Maui the kind of health care we deserve. And there is no indication they will do better in West Maui. The time for serving the public interest, not self-interest, is now.

At the West Maui Taxpayers Assn., we support the building of a true full service acute care emergency hospital whether we build it or someone else builds it. If Maui Memorial wants to build an elderly care facility, great, as long as it does not confuse the issue and make people believe acute emergency care is being provided when it is not.

If Dr. Ronald Kwon wants to build a Malulani Hospital in Kihei, great. All of these facilities are needed as Maui population soars, as forecast, to 60,000 to 75,000 in the next five years. The West Maui Taxpayers Assn. is calling for a Health Care Summit among all relevant constituencies to develop a common approach that serves the real needs of our communities.

No more politics, no more self-interest. Let me assure everyone, however, that the taxpayers association and the West Maui Improvement Foundation that will build the full-service hospital is moving full speed ahead to raise the funds to complete the final steps prior to an early groundbreaking.

We see the summit not as another delay but the opportunity to convince everyone that our plan is the best plan for the community. Let us all wake up to the fact that absence of an acute care hospital in a multi-billion dollar community represents a crisis. Lives are at stake.

Let us all get behind a plan that gives people a sense of assurance their lives are not at risk when they live, work, or play in West Maui.