Editorial: A new Hawaii State Hospital

At long last, the Hawaii State Hospital (HSH) has unveiled a new 144-bed psychiatric hospital — and with it, high hopes for better care of society’s most troubled people. Just as importantly, it promises to be a safer workplace for the staffers who care for them, a longstanding concern at the old facility.

The $160 million state-of-the-art hospital in Kaneohe was dedicated this week, and will begin housing its first patients in August. HSH is licensed for 202 beds, but in the recent past, waivers have enabled as many as 238 patients throughout several buildings. The overcrowding in outdated facilities with subpar monitoring technology, have factored into risky work conditions over the years.

The new hospital will house the most dangerous, high-risk patients — most ordered there by the courts. On any given day, a majority of patients are homeless and more than 90% are suffering from substance abuse problems on top of mental health issues, said Run Heidelberg, the hospital’s administrator.

The new facility is off to a good start in trying to incorporate the best practices in psychiatric hospital care: open spaces, classrooms, group therapy rooms, activity space, gym and fenced outdoor spaces to foster well-being for patients.

Chief among improvements for employees will be the clear sight lines from nursing stations that should enhance safety and security for all. It is unacceptable that in fiscal years 2013 and 2014, there had been 215 assaults at the hospital, 26 of them requiring outside medical treatment. The danger level, which prompted a lawsuit by injured workers, also led to a 2014 state Senate special committee investigating the hospital, including subpoenas. A final report warned that ongoing assaults at HSH could result in a fatality if safety problems weren’t addressed.

An imperative was the modern surveillance system — the old one was nonoperational in areas, which partly enabled the 2017 high-profile escape of Randall Saito. Saito, sent to HSH after standing trial for the 1979 murder of a woman at Ala Moana Center, was later recaptured in California.

The hospital’s myriad problems had been heralded more than a decade earlier. In 2005, the state Department of Health (DOH) commissioned a master plan to overhaul HSH, but the plan was never funded. It wasn’t until 2015 that then-DOH Director Virginia Pressler revamped the master plan and made the new facility a top priority; the plan calls for eventually increasing the campus’ patient capacity to 516 as other buildings are renovated.

At least 16 years in the making, the state’s new psychiatric hospital finally is a beacon of hope, especially amid today’s persistent population of troubled homeless people. It’s overdue, but also comes in the nick of time.