Of the 127 employees at Vidant Pungo Hospital, about 90 to 100 of those employees will be affected by transfers or loss of jobs, according to Vidant Health.

Vidant Health officials announced Wednesday the hospital in Belhaven would be closed within five or six months. The closing will take place in phases. A new outpatient multispecialty clinic that will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, will provide health care to Belhaven residents and surrounding communities, according to Vidant Health officials.

The new facility will employ about 30 people, according to published reports.

Rocky Jacobs, chairman of the Vidant Pungo Hospital Director’s Council, said he is not privy to any information regarding possible severance packages for employees who lose their jobs because of the closing. He said such information, if available, would have to come from Vidant Health’s human-resources department or its public-relations and marketing office.

Jacobs also said the decision to close the hospital was not an easy one to reach, especially regarding how the closure might affect hospital employees and Belhaven.

“It was a tremendous decision,” Jacobs said. “First of all, I was not a decision-maker. Vidant owns that hospital. The Vidant board of directors that was meeting was really the Vidant Community Hospitals board that controls eight of the community hospitals. … They were meeting as the Vidant Pungo board. Had it been another hospital, they would have been meeting as that board.”

Jacobs said he’s chairman of the Vidant Pungo Hospital Director’s Council, which serves as an advisory board to Vidant Community Hospitals.

“I’ve sat through some of the discussions, not all. It’s extremely painful. That hospital — I’ll put it in nautical terms — it was like a mother ship to that town. It’s gotten older. Every time we have a storm, it deteriorates a little bit more. It costs more to try to repair it, and if you repaired it to the extent it needed to be repaired to compete in today’s … world of medicine, it still would have been a 70-year-old, 60-year-old hospital and bigger than the town needs. So, the right decision was made, but it’s a very, very painful decision to give up a legacy of the town. It was a wonderful legacy, but one, frankly, that Vidant nor the town could support.”

Jacobs said that if the hospital had not merged with Vidant Health, “we would have had to done the same thing three years ago and we would not have had a replacement facility like Vidant is providing.” Jacobs said the hospital’s advisory council worked hard to make sure the town would have the around-the-clock multispecialty clinic to replace the hospital.

“We needed to do something, and Vidant was willing to do it,” Jacobs said. “We couldn’t do what they’ve just done.”