Hawaii Medical Center closed its Liliha hospital Thursday, after transferring its last few patients to other hospitals and long-term care facilities.

"With the cessation of patient care, HMC will lay off a significant majority of its nearly 1,000 employees by this weekend," CEO Maria Kostylo said. "Today is a sad day for all of us at Hawaii Medical Center. We’ve been a part of the community for 85 years, first as St. Francis Medical Center and then as Hawaii Medical Center. Despite our many challenges in recent years, the employees of HMC never wavered in their commitment to provide quality care for patients."

Hawaii Medical Center’s Ewa hospital shut down last week after transferring the last of its patients to the Liliha campus. The hospital said it had a difficult time transferring its last remaining patients with complex, chronic medical conditions that require long-term care, which is scarce in the community.

Dean Ida, a 44-year-old double amputee, was one of the last to leave the Liliha hospital late Wednesday. The hospital was having difficulty placing him because of his complex, chronic diabetes, which requires specialized dialysis four times a day.

Many hospitals and long-term care facilities do not provide the specialized dialysis that had been a large part of HMC’s business.

The hospital, which was home to Ida for the past six years, was able to place him in a Kaneohe foster home owned by a husband-and-wife certified nurses’ aide team. His nurse, who was laid off by HMC, comes every six hours to help him with his dialysis, according to Flora Velasquez, Ida’s case manager.

Ida was pleased with the move because he is from Kaneohe and has family close by.

"I’m happy, too; at least I found a good home," said Ida, who has had heart bypass surgery, suffered two strokes and has been diabetic since age 11. "I can see my friends and family on this side regularly."

HMC’s administration and billing departments will remain open as the hospitals wind down business operations.

"It has been a day of long conversations and a great deal of work and compromise by hospitals, long-term care facilities and the state, but at the end of the day, providers stepped up even though in most cases their facilities are at capacity and their resources are stretched to make sure these patients have a place to land," said George Greene, president and CEO of Healthcare Association of Hawaii, representing hospitals and nursing agencies statewide.

HMC, which has been in bankruptcy since June, decided last month to shut down after a plan to sell the hospitals to California-based Prime Healthcare Services proved unworkable.

St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii, HMC’s former owner and largest secured creditor, objected to the sale because the Catholic religious order would have been paid only about one-fourth of the nearly $40 million it is owed.

St. Francis announced in late October it was withdrawing from a bankruptcy reorganization plan that would have returned the facilities to the religious order.

The Franciscan sisters sold the hospitals in January 2007 for $68 million to HMC LLC, then a for-profit joint venture between Hawaii Physician Group LLC, composed of 130 local doctors, and Kansas-based Cardiovascular Hospitals of America.

St. Francis provided the bulk of the financing for the sale: $40.2 million.

HMC first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2008. It emerged in August 2010 and became a nonprofit organization governed by a nine-member board of directors before filing its second bankruptcy in June.

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