St. Francis preschool teacher Tammi Keao, right, delivers a meal to a client of St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii. Bringing a hot lunch to kupuna around Oahu was a major part of the health system’s outreach to the elderly during the pandemic. (Photo courtesy St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii)
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
While COVID-19 affected everyone differently, seniors, in particular, felt the force of the pandemic’s isolation.
With the coronavirus disproportionately harming those in their later years, these kupuna found themselves unable or unwilling to leave home and separated from contact with family and friends. After vaccinations started rolling out, the elderly with little or no access to computers or who were less tech-savvy struggled with scheduling shot appointments.
St. Francis Healthcare System of Hawaii was one local organization that worked extra hard to reach these kupuna. It focused on three crucial areas of need: food distribution to seniors, delivery of supplies and food to quarantined families, and assisting those without computer access or skills to register for COVID-19 vaccination appointments.
At the request of the Department of Health, St. Francis reached out to quarantined families who had no one else to bring them food and basic supplies, because whole families were isolating together, often in rural areas.
Food distribution to seniors started with St. Francis pitching in through the Show Aloha Challenge by offering a call center, meal pickups and deliveries to the elderly. St. Francis purchased meals from local restaurants and partnered with Elite Parking to keep their employees at work by delivering the meals. The program quickly went from 600 meals a day, seven days a week to 1,400 meals every day. Between March 2020 and February 2021, St. Francis helped deliver 175,000 meals.
“It was pretty cool helping restaurants survive and keeping Elite Parking folks employed while getting food out to the seniors,” said St. Francis Healthcare System CEO and president Jerry Correa.
When vaccines were made available to seniors, St. Francis set up a call center and would go online on behalf of their elderly callers to register them for their appointments. St. Francis volunteers would then often deliver to their door a printout of their appointment confirmation so they had it for vaccination day.
St. Francis was also one of the few places to never close its preschool, three adult daycares or hospice program during the pandemic. Safety measures were always taken but St. Francis made sure to reach out to the Department of Health, Queen’s Medical Center and Hawaii Pacific Health, in particular, to let first responders there know care was available at St. Francis.
“St. Francis really stepped up and it was about people relooking at the organization as a whole and seeing how we can pivot to support the community,” said St. Francis’ vice president of client services Melissa Ah Ho-Mauga.
She said that St. Francis Healthcare knows it can’t do everything by itself and that partnerships with other organizations are the way to reach more people.
Donors helped cover some costs, but St. Francis did take a financial hit during the pandemic due to people withdrawing from adult daycare and the preschool, home health programs and other services, plus fewer people feeling comfortable about going in for routine medical appointments.
“We acted to the crisis first and then started looking at how to cover costs,” Correa said. He added that while income was down, “I’ve never seen us, particularly since I’ve been here, help so many people.”
Experience leads to new ideas
At the start of the food delivery program, Correa took a route himself and delivered meals seven days a week as did many of St. Francis’ senior leadership team.
“I initially wanted to see what was going on so I could tell the donors,” he said. But he soon realized that one major side effect of the pandemic was isolation, worries over where and how seniors would get food and medication and the resulting depression caused by that. Correa said that in the 17 or so people he’d see on his route, many would come up with something to talk to him about for 15-20 minutes after receiving their meals.
“I may be the only person they are talking to during the day,” Correa said he realized.
“Besides helping people with their food, it really felt good reaching out to people in this time of need,” Correa said.
For her part, Melissa Ah Ho-Mauga acted as the first contact to many of the quarantined families with which St. Francis worked. One man she spoke to on the phone said he was glad to get supplies but soon shared a deeper issue. He felt guilty about bringing COVID-19 home with him from his stevedore job and was also struggling with a recent cancer diagnosis. He said he was considering suicide and that his family had no idea.
Ah Ho-Mauga, who has a social services background, talked to the man for over an hour until he seemed to be in a better place. The next day she went out to drop off quarantine items and spoke with the man’s wife, who said he had finally opened up to her about his suicidal feelings.
“She was very thankful that he had someone to talk,” Ah Ho-Mauga said. By the end of the family’s 10 days of quarantine, she saw that the family was in a much better place.
After seeing firsthand these mental and emotional side effects during the pandemic, St. Francis is now looking to provide more “wrap-around” services to clients besides healthcare.
Some volunteers who dropped off meals found out those elderly didn’t have a way to get to medical and other appointments. The volunteers then went back to drive them where they needed to go. Correa would like to see St. Francis do more of that sort of outreach.
“We’d keep food distribution going but use it as a conduit to that senior to find out if there’s anything else we can do,” he said.
Social workers could go out to work with those kupuna to offer “wrap-around services.”
“At the end of day, we’re trying to keep them at home and provide what they need so they can stay out of the hospital,” Correa said.
“As the community ages, we want to help in allowing them to age in place or how they want to do that,” Ah Ho-Mauga said. “It’s a work in progress in how that can be expanded.”
