Some 80 percent of the people who now receive care at Allegheny General Hospital - Suburban Campus will continue to do so when changes in service are instituted this August. That was the message representatives of the West Penn Allegheny Health System (WPAHS) brought to a town hall meeting in Bellevue, held one day after WPAHS announced that the emergency department and inpatient care would be taken off life support in 90 days.

About 130 people attended Friday's meeting, at which hospital officers outlined how the area's population decline and abundance of hospitals, plus improvements in health care, have impacted the Bellevue hospital.

"If we continue doing what we are doing, it will become a crisis and we will not be able to provide any services," said Dawn Gideon, executive vice president and chief of hospital operations for WPAHS.

Gideon said that hospitals today are finding that fewer people are being admitted as inpatients, and health care facilities are not being adequately reimbursed by insurance companies for services performed.

"We're not getting paid what it costs to perform them," Gideon said.

WPAHS decided to eliminate "redundant" services in and near the City of Pittsburgh to allow for more efficient -- and cost-effective -- use of the hospitals, Gideon said.

Gideon said that the Suburban Campus has been "importing" patients, with only 35 percent from Bellevue, 19 percent from Brighton Heights, 9 percent from West View, 6 percent from the Observatory Hill area, and 31 percent from all other areas, including neighboring counties.

On an average day, Gideon said, Suburban Campus has only 28 inpatients, and in a year performs only 1,500 outpatient surgeries.

"That's a very low number," Gideon said. "We have the ability to take care of these patients elsewhere."

She spelled out how the changes will compare to services now offered at the Suburban Campus: Instead of 28 inpatients and 30 longterm acute care beds, Life Care will provide more than 80 longterm acute care beds. No outpatient surgeries will be performed at Suburban.

There will be no change in service in the areas of oncology/chemotherapy, physical therapy and rehabilitation, lab testing and blood work, X-ray and radiology, dialysis or the GI lab.

The loss of the emergency department was a concern to a number of the people who attended Friday's meeting. An urgent care center, open about 12 hours per day, will take the place of the E.R.

Gideon said that the Suburban E.R. now gets about 21,000 visits per year, some 86 percent of which do not actually need to be in an emergency room. The urgent care center will be able to handle more than 18,000 of those visits, she said.

She noted that Suburban's emergency room has not been a trauma center for many years, with the most serious cases -- including patients who have been severely injured or who are suffering from conditions such as stroke or a heart attack -- already being transported to a hospital better able to handle those cases.

In addition, she said, E.R. usage has overwhelmingly occurred between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., when the new urgent care center is expected to be open.

Of the patients who will be excluded by the change from E.R. to urgent care, some of those attending the meeting were concerned about the quality of care they could expect at Allegheny General's Main Campus, and how long they might have to wait just to see a doctor.

One mother spoke of waiting for four hours in the AGH emergency room after her daughter had been brought in by ambulance with multiple fractures. WPAHS officers agreed that longer waits at a trauma center would probably be the norm, although the case cited by the mother was something that should not have happened under normal circumstances, they said.

Gideon said that WPAHS has recognized that Suburban Campus may continue to see people suffering from serious conditions who show up at the urgent care center, whether it is open or not. Steps are being taken to make sure that those patients are transported to an emergency room, and even to have an ambulance stationed at Suburban, she said.

Although many who attended Friday's meeting expressed concerns about whether the changes would be as good for the community as they will be for WPAHS, there was one definite positive that will come: both Bellevue and the Northgate School District will begin receiving property tax revenue when for-profit companies begin using the Suburban Campus. WPAHS officers said that they did not know exactly how much of the property, which some estimated to be worth more than $30 million, would go on the tax rolls.