The $12 million Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Family Medical Center recently opened as part of the Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center. The hospital decided to expand as patients and staff continue to grow, according to an article by the Honolulu Advertiser.
The expansion is expected to create several new Hawaii jobs, including some entry level positions. The center had seven staff members when it opened in 1972. In 1979 that number had grown to 50. Today, there are 500 staff members at the hospital, and the center is the largest employer on the Wai'anae Coast.
The new facility is 20,000-square-feet, and is the first phase of a three-part plan to eventually alter the entire campus, with one level dedicated to pediatrics, a second to women's health and a third to training. The hospital currently treats about 26,000 patients per year.
"We simply have outgrown the facility as it was," Richard Bettini, the center's chief executive officer, said in the article.
The new facility is aimed at providing the best healthcare for residents of the Wai'anae Coast, which includes many Hawaiians and a high number of homeless people. The center has a policy of turning no person away, regardless of their ability to pay.
"The challenge of the new building was to bring a 21st century healthcare facility to the Wai'anae Coast and yet have it be appropriate to the region and married to the philosophy the center has between Native Hawaiian healing practices and Western medicine," Brett Hartle, project designer who was responsible for the building's exterior plan for the Kober Hanssen Mitchell architectural firm, said in the article.
The new facility also will focus on training students assigned to Wai'anae as part of a community-based medical school partnership with A.T. Stills University, which has campuses in Arizona and Missouri."We're now training people from the community to be doctors," Bettini added. "That ground floor floor allows us to integrate those things right here. But we also need to be training people at entry level jobs. Those salaries ought to be going to people out here so they can afford to live."
