About 130 people attended the town hall meeting Friday to discuss the changes that are coming to Allegheny General Hospital - Suburban Campus.

That was a pretty decent crowd for 6:30 p.m. on a Friday evening in May.

A large segment of those in attendance were elected officials or representatives thereof: almost everyone on Bellevue Council, one member of Ben Avon Council, a couple Northgate School Board members, and representatives from U.S. Congressman Mike Doyle's office and from state Rep. Rob Matzie's office. Oh, and the ever-talkative Matt Drozd, our rep on Allegheny County Council.

Another segment was comprised of people who work at the hospital, who have a vested interest in what happens there because they could be trading a paycheck for an unemployment check in a few months.

Of those remaining, the median age was somewhere around 72.

The hospital made a pretty compelling argument in support of the changes that are coming. The bottom line is that we're either going to get a changed hospital or no hospital at all.

Change is not necessarily bad. Uncomfortable. Often inconvenient. But not necessarily bad.

One big concern is the loss of the emergency room. It's not as big a loss as one might expect, given that the Suburban Campus has been operating something more akin to a 24-hour doctor's office than a true emergency department for many years. Most of the patients who come to the ER at Suburban will still be able to go to the new urgent care center, and the hospital says it is working with NorthWest EMS to keep an ambulance there so that more serious cases can be transported quickly and local response times stay fast.

The meeting did point out one issue WPAHS should address, which is the quality of service that exists at its AGH ER. One mother talked of sitting in the ER at the Main Campus for four hours with a child who had sustained multiple fractures and been brought in by ambulance.

We know that, around the country, ER waits are horrifying. People sit in crowded emergency rooms for 8 hours, 12 hours, and more. Hospital administrators look at the national averages and think that a 4-hour wait is great. If you're the one sitting there, it's not so great.

Another issue is how people are treated in a large hospital. At Suburban, we felt safe, reassured...we felt like we were seen. The staff not only was sufficient to provide attentive care to patients, but they were people we knew. They lived in our neighborhoods, our kids went to school with their kids, they were members of our families.

We're not going to get that in a big hospital, and it's one of those immeasurable factors that has a major impact on recovery. Consider the fact that doctors who are warm and personable get sued for malpractice far less than those who suffer from a lack of people skills, even when they screw up more. So perhaps AGH could work on how patients are treated on the non-medical side of the equation.

One of the highlights of the change is that Bellevue and Northgate will be receiving property tax revenue from the previously tax-exempt hospital property. No one knows how much will be coming in, but the new for-profit enterprises should produce some nice revenue for the community.

Do we want to see Suburban Campus change? Heck, no. Is it going to? Oh, yes. Hopefully, with some help from WPAHS and some interest from all of us, we'll look back in a few years and find that the change has been for the positive.