By Anemona Hartocollis

The financially ailing St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan in Greenwich Village got a month’s reprieve on Wednesday, as Gov. David A. Paterson met with hospital officials, elected officials and others to try to keep the hospital from closing.

After the 90-minute meeting in his Manhattan office, the governor said that he expected to be able to keep the hospital afloat for the next four weeks through a combination of state loans and help from its creditors. On Tuesday, St. Vincent’s received an $8 million loan — $6 million from the state and $2 million from a creditor — just to meet its current payroll.

But Governor Paterson was guarded about the hospital’s long-term prospects, saying only that he was forming a task force to look at how to run the hospital more efficiently and to examine the health care needs of the surrounding community and how they might best be delivered.

“We are trying to give it every chance to survive,” Governor Paterson said of St. Vincent’s. But he said the hospital had lost $80 million last year, and made it clear that the state’s offer of help was not open-ended, saying, “We don’t want to put supplies on a sinking ship.”

One person who was at the meeting, who asked not to be named because the meeting was private, said St. Vincent’s newly hired restructuring consultant, Mark E. Toney, had suggested that as much as $20 million might be needed to stabilize the hospital.

St. Vincent’s, which is carrying $700 million in debt, revealed last week that it had been looking for a partner to help keep the hospital from going bankrupt for the second time in five years or being forced to close. Continuum Health Partners, which operates St. Luke’s Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals in Manhattan, among others, is the only potential partner to have stepped forward.

But Continuum’s plan to close down the hospital’s inpatient beds and emergency room, turning it into an outpatient operation, generated immediate opposition from the neighborhood.

The hospital, founded by the Sisters of Charity, has been serving Greenwich Village since 1849, and is the last remaining Roman Catholic general hospital in New York City.

The governor said that the Continuum plan had not specifically been discussed at the meeting, but that “when you have a hospital teetering on the verge of insolvency, there isn’t any relief you won’t consider.”

Among others at the meeting were City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn; Alfred E. Smith IV, the chairman of St. Vincent’s board; hospital creditors and the state health commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines.

“We seem to have bought the hospital another four weeks, so that’s a good thing,” Ms. Quinn said. “We’re not in as much of a panic mode.”

Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, who was also at the meeting, said there seemed to be a willingness on the part of both the state and private creditors to extend credit to St. Vincent’s while it tried to restructure. “The prognosis here is not a good one, but it’s probably the best thing that can be done at this point in time,” Mr. Raske said.

St. Vincent’s merged with several other Catholic hospitals in 2000, but many of those hospitals were in poor neighborhoods, and the merger seemed to only deepen its financial problems. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2005 and divested itself of most of the other hospitals, which were sold or closed.

But St. Vincent’s officials said the main hospital had been hobbled by mortgage debt and pension obligations from the divested facilities, as well as the recession, Medicare and Medicaid cuts and a high proportion of poor patients.