WAI'ANAE — Tomorrow marks the official blessing of the Wai'anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center's new $12 million Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Family Medical Center.

"It's going to be quite spectacular," said Kauila Clark, vice chair of the center's board of directors, who will help perform the blessing. "The Royal Hawaiian Band will play, and there's going to be a hula halau, and a whole procession with ceremony and protocol."

The 20,000-square-foot facility — the first phase of a three-part plan that will eventually alter the entire campus — has one level dedicated to pediatrics, a second to women's health, and a third to training.

It was a welcome addition to a facility that treats some 26,000 patients annually.

"We simply have outgrown the facility as it was," said Richard Bettini, the center's chief executive officer. The center had a staff of seven when it opened in 1972. When Bettini arrived in 1979 it had grown to 50. Today, the staff numbers 500, and the center is the largest employer on the Wai'anae Coast.

Everything about the new structure is aimed at providing the best healthcare for residents of the Wai'anae Coast, which includes a large Hawaiian population and disproportionately high number of disadvantaged and homeless people. The center's policy is to turn away no person, regardless of his or her ability to pay.

Patients have included the penniless as well as the rich and famous.

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," said Brett Hartle, project designer who was responsible for the building's exterior plan for the Kober Hanssen Mitchell architectural firm.

'INTEGRATED SERVICES'

Importance paid to cultural considerations is illustrated by the ulu, or breadfruit tree, that stands near the front entrance of the new building. The tree was planted more than two decades ago by a revered kupuna, who has since passed on. The tree is considered sacred.

"It was absolutely out of the question to remove or relocate it" Hartle said. "So we really shaped the building around the ulu tree."

The center pioneered what folks at the facility refer to as "integrated services" — meaning they include Western, Eastern and alternative health procedures — with a special emphasis on Native Hawaiian healing methods.

Such a concept was done to break down the cultural barriers that had prevented people from seeking medical and health care.

The center spent years developing its integrated services in a way that offers patients maximum accommodation. Instead of the old model where patients moved from location to location to receive various services, at the center they go to a single examination room. Once there, doctors and other specialists then come to the patient as they are needed.

The Family Care Center building was designed to fit the concept. For example, physicians can move in a circular pathway around the pediatrics and women's health floors.

"That was done so that the doctors would have easy access to all the examination rooms," said Laurie Kaneshiro, director of Interior Design for the architectural company. "There's an efficiency in the way that they move around on the floor, so that medical assistants are in the center and radiate out. And the doctors' offices are positioned close to where the exams rooms are."

TRAINING COMMUNITY

One of the more promising aspects of the new building is found on its lower level.

The ground floor, known as the Learning Level, will train 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, and provides graduate level healthcare education.

Marianne Glushenko, assistant director for the center, calls this aspect of the facility — training students born and raised in the community who in turn will care for residents on the coast — "a new frontier for us."

That frontier will do more than bring in a much needed stream of physicians who understand the culture and the community because they are part of it, Bettini said. It will provide psychologists, traditional healers, and other specialists as well.

"We're now training people from the community to be doctors," he said. "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."