North Shore health Kahuku High School football players and other students seeking free school and sports physicals ran into problems when North Shore mobile clinics ran out of money.
clinics feel the pinch
Closed doors greet students
who require physicals for schoolBy Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.comThe Waikiki Health Center closed two of the three clinics at the end of July for two weeks, said the Rev. Frank Chong, center executive director.
The Haleiwa clinic, held all day on Tuesdays at the Queen Liliuokalani Protestant Church, was kept open by "pulling together some monies that we had not spent," he said.
The closed clinics in Punaluu and Kahaluu were reopened with contributions from private donors, primarily the Weinberg Foundation, Chong said.
Meanwhile, the Haleiwa clinic was deluged with clients from all three sites, said Dale Allison, director of the center's Ho'ola Like (Healers Together) Outreach Project.
When the staff arrived at the church to set up the Haleiwa clinic Aug. 23, she said, "We were overwhelmed with the number of students."
The medical team usually can accommodate walk-in visits, but there were more people than they could see that day, she said.
Besides regular clients, there were many high school and college-age students seeking physicals required for school and sports, she said.
Many of the students had gone to Kahuku Hospital's clinic and were turned away because they could not afford the $20 fee for the checkup, Allison said.
"The Kahuku Hospital clinic has the policy that they will see people if they pay $20 or sign a waiver that they will pay the $20 in the future."
But sometimes people will not sign the waiver or have not paid off a waiver from a previous clinic visit, she said.
She said 12 people were turned away and some returned the following week.
The only all-day clinic on the North Shore is in Haleiwa. The Punaluu clinic is held Thursday mornings at the Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center. The Kahaluu clinic is at the KEY Project on Friday mornings.
The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration praised the outreach project two years ago as a national model for "breaking down barriers to health access."
But the clinics, which provide care for about 150 uninsured and underinsured patients a month, struggle financially.
The current grants will end about the middle of next month, and the center is hoping for two possible funding sources to sustain the clinics, Chong said.
They include a $100,000 city appropriation from federal community development block-grant money and renewal of an Office of Hawaiian Affairs grant.
OHA had given the outreach project a grant because about 70 percent of patients at the clinics are of Hawaiian ancestry. When it ended, OHA could not renew it because of a legal ruling that it did not go through the state procurement code's competitive bid process. This year's Legislature remedied that situation.
A $100,000 appropriation came out of City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi's Budget Committee in May but probably will not be released until the federal fiscal year begins in October, he said.