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. 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. 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.