Demolition starts next week at former HMC-West hospital

Queen’s Health Systems will begin demolition Monday of the former Hawaii Medical Center hospital in West Oahu.

Parts of the Ewa facility, which has not been updated in 25 years, will be gutted and expanded to double the capacity of its emergency and operating departments when it opens next spring.

Queen’s is spending more than $70 million on renovations, new equipment and the acquisition — the largest in recent history. Its last purchase, in 1987, was of Molokai General Hospital, which has 15 beds.

"This really is opening a brand-new Queen’s Medical Center West Oahu. It will look and feel different than it ever did before," said Susan Murray, senior vice president of Queen’s West Oahu. "It will have very much the look and feel of the Queen’s Medical Center downtown."

Emergency rooms will expand to 23 from 10, while operating rooms will expand to four from two. Two procedure rooms also will be added. The hospital will have an intensive care unit as well as diagnostic imaging and gynecology services, but no obstetrics.

In addition, trauma cases and serious procedures, including open-heart surgeries and transplants, will be treated at the main Queen’s facility downtown.

"It’s like a state crisis without (the hospital being open)," said Ewa Beach resident Kenneth Faria, 37, also a paramedic supervisor for the city’s Emergency Medical Services Division. "The population on our side has increased and it’s going to provide a huge relief for the other hospitals such as Pali Momi, Wahiawa and Kaiser, which are just getting overwhelmed with ER patients — both walk-ins and ambulance transports."

Queen’s, which operates the main trauma center in the Pacific, expects to initially hire up to 400 workers — more than half of them registered nurses — as early as this summer to staff the only acute-care hospital in West Oahu. It hopes to attract between 60 and 80 core physicians to the hospital.

The hospital will reopen with 82 beds, though it is licensed for 130. Queen’s said it will increase the number as demand grows.

"For the primary care physician, they (now) have to send someone for an X-ray six to eight miles away," said Whitney Limm, vice president of clinical integration. "They would want to be able to have imaging done on-site. They want to have specialists on the campus. They want to admit their patients on campus."

St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii, operated by a Catholic religious order, first opened the Ewa hospital in 1990 with 136 beds. Before it was shuttered, HMC-West had 102 beds.

Queen’s completed its purchase of the facility from St. Francis on Dec. 14, a year after the bankrupt HMC-West abruptly closed, placing an immediate strain on the state’s emergency medical services and inundating other hospitals with West Oahu patients.