WASHINGTON - Veterans hospitals in cities across the country could be closed as the Department of Veterans Affairs moves its focus to outpatient care and works to bring services closer to people who need them.

The massive restructuring, being announced today, would touch every community where the VA operates, though decisions about specific cities and hospitals won't be made for more than a year. In some cities, hospitals are likely to be closed or operations scaled back; in others, new services will be added.

Information about the fate of Mississippi's VA hospitals was not available Wednesday night.

"This is not about the closure of facilities. It's about continuing the change in VA health care and changing it for the better," Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Dr. Leo S. Mackay Jr. said in an interview.

Decisions about where to cut and where to add will be made after analyses of demographics and services available at 163 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, nursing homes and other health care facilities.

An independent, nine-member commission is to make recommendations to the VA secretary in August 2003. As with recommendations on military base closings, the secretary must accept or reject the plan as a whole, an attempt to minimize the politics surrounding the closing of sometimes cherished institutions.

Some veterans are concerned that the VA may be dismantling an infrastructure that is part of the national homeland security plan. And they worry that some vets will lose access to care.

"While they keep saying they're improving services, they are drastically cutting services," said Bruce Parry, 55, of Veterans for Unification, a Chicago advocacy group. "The result will be the VA serves fewer veterans, and as people find it less attractive, they will have further excuses for shutting more down in the future."

The national overhaul, recommended by government auditors in 1999, is aimed at shifting dollars away from aging, inefficient facilities in communities where the number of veterans is shrinking in order to provide modern medicine closer to where vets of the future will live.

The 1999 audit, by the General Accounting Office, predicted that without change, the VA would wind up spending billions of dollars to operate unneeded buildings, with as much as one of every four VA health care dollars devoted to the maintenance and operation of facilities.

It's easier said than done. In a pilot program in one region, the VA opted to cut inpatient service from a downtown Chicago hospital and expand services at other facilities. Veterans groups were outraged, and VA officials are pledging to consider their opinions upfront as the market analyses begin across the country.

The GAO suggested that the greatest potential for savings was in 40 cities where there is more than one VA hospital. These hospitals have a significant number of empty beds and compete with one another to serve "rapidly declining veteran populations," auditors said.

VA officials declined to speculate as to which hospitals might close and said their goal is not to cut services but to redeploy them to areas where they are needed more. They emphasized that hospital beds are not needed for the VA's new emphasis on outpatient care, which follows a national shift spurred by better drugs and more outpatient surgeries.

"We're looking to allocate our resources more efficiently, in ways that keep pace with the American medical system," Mackay said.

The initial analyses will be done on a market-by-market and then a regional level, but in the end, Mackay said, dollars could shift from one part of the country to another.

For example, he said, like the overall population, veterans have shifted from Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Boston and New York to Sun Belt states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona.

In Chicago, for instance, he said that the veterans population is expected to shrink from 77,000 to 43,000 over 10 years. "Those are the kind of demographic and geographic shifts we're trying to accommodate," he said.

Veterans groups are skeptical. The American Legion worries that current health care needs, which are often not met by an overtaxed system, will be ignored in the face of restructuring, said Mark Regan, assistant director for program management.

"We recognize the need for VA to do strategic planning to make effective use of their resources," he said. "The most important thing is for veterans to be involved in the process."