WAILUKU – Maui Memorial Medical Center’s adolescent behavioral health unit, Molokini II, will be closing Oct. 15, two months earlier than originally anticipated, hospital administrators announced at a meeting Tuesday.

But that doesn’t mean that the community will be left without adolescent mental health resources on Maui, officials said. Hospital administrators hosted a stakeholders meeting Tuesday morning to discuss possible short- and long-term solutions once the unit closes.

“With acute services going away, we talked about coordinating with Queen’s (Medical Center) and Kahi (Mohala). But there are existing crisis services in our community, pretty robust services,” said MMMC Chief Business Officer Nick Hughey. “They’re gearing up to prepare their crisis services for our closure, and we’re beefing up services in our emergency room to prepare for transfers.”

Administrators had expected to keep the unit open until December to accommodate the 90-day period affected employees have to find positions elsewhere in the hospital. But “almost all” of the seven employees who would be affected by the shutdown have already found other jobs within the hospital, officials said Tuesday, though talks were still ongoing. Five other positions in the unit remained vacant.

“The date is moved up from what we thought because as we made the announcements and gave notices, we were fortunate enough that people were able to get jobs elsewhere in the hospital,” Hughey said.

Any patients admitted to Molokini II at the time of the closure will be transferred to facilities on Oahu – either Kahi Mohala or Queen’s Medical Center – or, if dispositions permit, discharged, Hughey said.

Closing the unit is “a real bummer,” hospital officials said, but they are working to find ways to continue providing needed services for the Maui community, even if it means outside of the hospital.

“There’s going to be people upset no matter what, I think it’s important that we, the mental health community, collaborate. We aren’t just leaving (people without) the service. We’re actually trying to make it more robust in different ways and with different models,” said MMMC Chief Executive Officer Wesley Lo.

Legislators, nonprofit groups, officials with the Maui Police Department and representatives from the state departments of Education and Health sat down with hospital administrators on Tuesday for the first time since talks of the closure began earlier this year. While no definitive solution was reached by the end of Tuesday’s meeting, hospital administrators said they planned to host monthly meetings to continue the discussion.

“As a community, we’ve become segmented, today was really the first time in a while that we’ve come together and really tried to collaborate and become more of a community of providers,” said Tina Boteilho, who leads the Maui Crisis Outreach team. The nonprofit is a team of nonprofit workers contracted by the state to respond to mental health emergencies on Maui, Lanai and Molokai. “It was really nice to be able to revisit that community style of planning and brainstorming.”

One of the main priorities that came from the meeting was that the focus needs to be shifted more toward prevention and early identification, attendees said.

“A lot of time, there’s too much attention paid on the acute-care side, because that’s when the crisis is. But preventing the crisis is actually more important than all this other stuff,” Lo said. “If we can do a better job of prevention and keeping them out of the hospital, it’s better than trying to find ways to staff (the hospital).”

One local community group that provides preventative care for youths is Maui Youth & Family Services. The nonprofit offers in-home support services, substance abuse programs, school-based services and therapeutic foster care.

“We’re definitely going to shift more towards prevention,” Stephen Bennett, a family therapist with Maui Youth & Family Services, said after Tuesday’s meeting. “That means utilizing school-based health prevention services, utilizing Department of Health services to get early assessments, trying to get families and kids into therapeutic services before situations escalate into crisis situations where they need acute medical care.”

Bennett added that the organization is always recruiting families and foster parents who are able and willing to help youths in need.

Finding and keeping specialized physicians on Maui has always been the problem, not only for MMMC but also for nonprofit groups and state agencies like the departments of Education and Health.

“The state’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division has the money and position for a child psychiatrist, but they can’t get one. The DOE has allocated positions but have contracted positions. We compete against each other every time a psychiatrist comes down here. There’s just so few of these guys around,” Lo said.

He said a possible long-term solution would be if the various agencies, nonprofits and hospital could “pool our money together” to fund a community-based psychiatric medical staff team.

In the meantime, though, emergency acute-care services will still be provided by MMMC, and if needed, at Kahi Mohala or Queen’s Medical Center on Oahu.

“We will be coordinating these services, but there will be a time when you need these acute services in youth psychiatry, and when you need it you need it,” Hughey said. “That service will still exist, and we are working to coordinate . . . to make sure the transfers go as smooth as possible . . . When you need that critical service, it’s still available in our state and to the folks in Maui County.”

South and West Maui Sen. Roz Baker, who attended Tuesday’s meeting along with House Speaker Joe Souki, said while she had hoped to keep Molokini II open, she was hopeful that much-needed services would continue to be provided on Maui.

“Just because Molokini is closing, it doesn’t mean there’s not going to be treatment and other options available on Maui,” Baker said. “We have services in the community, and we will continue to have those services.”

Baker also alluded to “long-term solutions that may make a change in some of the rules,” such as allowing the hospital to enter into a public-private partnership. But that proposal would not resurface until early next year, at the earliest, when the Legislature returns for its lawmaking session.

Bills proposed in two past legislative sessions would have allowed the hospital to enter into a partnership, but those died in committees.

Hospital administrators, doctors and nonprofit groups have said that partnering with a responsible, proven hospital care provider would allow them greater access to financial as well as other resources.

To access the 24-hour state crisis mobile outreach hotline, call (800) 753-6879.

For more information about Maui Youth & Family Services, call 579-8414.

* Eileen Chao can be reached at echao@mauinews.com.