Brain-injury
treatment program
gets reprieve

The program at the Hawaii
State Hospital is extended
for two weeks

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

An appeal from legislators has won a two-week extension for a Hawaii State Hospital treatment program for brain injury victims that was due to close Wednesday.

The House Human Services and Health committees asked the Health Department to extend the services and questioned what is being done to move the patients to private programs.

"We see a dilemma in (the Hawaii State Hospital) wanting to focus on their mission, the mentally ill," said Lyna Burian, past president and board member of the Brain Injury Association of Hawaii. "But what do you do with all these people they are going to stop services for?"

The state Department of Health is looking into some way to provide rehabilitation services outside the hospital, said Patrick Johnston, department spokesman.

He said no similar services are available on Oahu. "There are ongoing discussions in the department whether facilities in the community could take this over, or other options.

"Nobody's going to leave these guys out in the cold."

Johnston said closure of the neuropsychology treatment and training program has nothing to do with a department proposal to replace the hospital with community-treatment programs.

Hospital doctors provide neuropsychology rehabilitation on an outpatient basis, he said.

"There has been criticism that this type of service within the hospital is taking resources away from the mission of the hospital to focus on the inpatient side."

Rep. Dennis Arakaki, human services chairman, said legislators received many calls, petitions and letters from brain injury survivors and family members who said patients would have difficulty functioning without the services.

Neuropsychology involves therapeutic retraining of people with brain injury. When the program began at the State Hospital in Kaneohe in 1972 it was one of the first in the nation.

Arakaki said a major concern is how alternatives to the hospital's neuropsychology program and care of other patients will be paid for in the community if the hospital closes.

"If everybody assumes community-based treatment is going to be free, they may be in for a surprise," he said.

An architect in the facilities planning office for the community colleges, Burian said Hawaii State Hospital was never appropriate for the neuropsychology program because it serves the mentally ill rather than other disabled people.

But it has been "really a gem -- the only service for people with brain injuries," she said.

Burian said some patients are children who must receive state services under the Felix consent decree. "So if they close this, they will have to send Felix kids to the mainland."

Burian said only about 40 people attend the State Hospital program because that's all the neuropsychologist and four neurotraining therapists can serve.

"But they have a long waiting list," she said, "and have been teaching Department of Education teachers and vocational counselors to transfer to them some of the knowledge they have."

Burian's son Albert, 22, is among those on the waiting list. "I try to apply to him some of the things I hear they do," she said. "Unfortunately, now he may not even have a chance to get in there." Burian said her son was struck by a tow truck six years ago while crossing the street in front of Punahou School, where he was a junior.

He was in a coma 2 1/2 months, she said. "Doctors gave up on him. They told us he was going to be a vegetable the rest of his life."

His recovery has been slow but he is taking courses now at the University of Hawaii, Burian said. "We're trying to get him in a leadership conference in Alexandria, Va., for youth with disabilities. He is so motivated."