Sister Maureen Keleher’s vision of healing broke new ground in clinical care that reached far outside the hospital walls.
Sister Maureen believed deeply in the motto of St. Francis of Assisi: "It is in giving that we receive." She was chief executive officer for St. Francis Medical Center from 1953 to 1988, founding Hawaii's first hospice program and advancing plans for St. Francis Medical Center-West in Ewa.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, she earned a nursing degree from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and later, a master's degree in sociology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Under Sister Maureen's leadership, St. Francis became a leader in organ transplants, pioneering the state’s first kidney, bone marrow and heart transplants.
The Liliha Street hospital also has been at the forefront of kidney dialysis, substance abuse treatment for women, cancer rehabilitation and care for senior citizens.
But Sister Maureen's true legacy was her pioneering effort in the late 1970s to bring to Hawaii the concept of hospice care – where terminally ill patients are cared for in their homes, or a setting outside the traditional hospital, with as little pain as possible.
When the 12-bed Sister Maureen Keleher Center opened in Nuuanu in 1988, it was the state’s first freestanding, inpatient hospice facility in the state and one of a few in the nation. When Sister Maureen died on Thanksgiving morning in 1995 after a long illness, she was hailed as a visionary of the hospital community.
But for Sister Maureen, the hospital business was not about the number of beds her facilities could accommodate or being the first to put in the latest medical equipment.
"The quality of health care service is more than diagnosis and treatment," she wrote in 1977. "It encompasses the reaching out and touching of patients as individuals, and, at the same time, keenly understanding them as people."