Hawaii Care Choices will reopen its Pohai Malama Care Center facility in Hilo in the next few months as the care provider celebrates its 40th anniversary.
At an anniversary ceremony Thursday, Hawaii Care Choices CEO Brenda Ho announced that in “December or January,” the 12-bed hospice and palliative care facility, which closed last November, will reopen as an adult residential care facility with a focus on providing memory care to residents.
The facility was closed, Ho said, based on a change in how patients wanted to be treated. Fewer and fewer people wanted to receive treatment in the facility, preferring instead to stay home and receive treatment through house calls or at the hospital. When the facility closed last year, it had an occupancy rate of about 40% throughout the preceding year.
But with the reopening, Ho said she wants to expand the range of services available to patients, adding that services offering memory care for patients with dementia are limited on the Big Island.
“Our community deserves better,” Ho said. “Sometimes dementia patients have to be treated on Oahu or even on the mainland. And they shouldn’t have to do that.”
Ho said that she hopes Hawaii Care Choices can expand into offering bereavement and elderly care to help the island’s aging population.
“It’s not about growing to make a profit — because, believe me, we’re not making a profit here — but it’s about applying what we know to help more people,” Ho said.
Ho said in a speech Thursday that she believes Hawaii Care Choices easily has another 40 years ahead of it, and reflected on how the industry has changed since she became CEO 33 years ago.
“When we started it was new,” Ho said, adding that, in 1983, the provider served four patients, compared to the roughly 900 it treated in 2022. “It was hard to get people to understand it … I wanted to help people not be so afraid of mortality.
“That hasn’t happened yet,” Ho continued. “People are afraid of death and they want to avoid the subject. But the conversation is happening more often.”
Mayor Mitch Roth, who delivered a proclamation recognizing and commending Hawaii Care Choices’ years of work at the anniversary ceremony, said he initially thought a hospice was just “a place for people who are at the end of their lives to go,” but learned its true value when his mother passed away years ago.
Roth, growing emotional as he told his story, said that Hawaii Care Choices marketing manager Lani Weigert helped him and his family work through options for his mother at the end of her life, and eventually settled on at-home care, which he said allowed her to survive another two years, well beyond her initial six-month prognosis.
“It made my mom’s life special,” Roth said.
Ho thanked Roth, the County of Hawaii, and Hawaii Care Choices’ employees for making the last 40 years possible and said she hopes to work with other health care providers to “break down the silos” between different fields of healthcare so that Big Island residents can receive the best treatment available without leaving the island.
“We want to give life to your days, even if we can’t give more days to your life,” Ho said.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.