can get checks on your blood sugar and your blood pressure and you can have your cholesterol level measured. As we see it, this is an attempt to make the King Edward more "user friendly''.

This year Bermuda is celebrating 100 years of hospital care and this weekend is very sensibly designed to demonstrate to Bermudians just what care is available and under what circumstances.

For many of us, the hospital is a place where we go only when we have to and then we go reluctantly. This attitude tends to make the hospital a rather frightening place instead of a place of health and help. Yet the King Edward is Bermuda's most vital service.

The King Edward has suffered from a tendency on behalf of locals to gossip destructively about its flaws, often inaccurately, and to treat it severely when mistakes happen. We think the King Edward's image has suffered because Bermuda is a small and very critical place and because Bermudians have a tendency to tear down the very things they erect. This newspaper thinks the King Edward is a fine small general hospital of which Bermuda can and should be proud and that it is often misunderstood and mistreated. Too often Bermuda talks about the hospital's failings and ignores its large measure of success.

In recent years the King Edward has suffered from a tendency on the part of insured persons to rush abroad for treatment of even relatively minor ills.

This has led to fears that if Bermudians do not use their own hospital all they possibly can, then the King Edward might be reduced to dealing with only emergencies and the uninsured, leading to a decrease in services rather than the enhanced hospital Bermuda deserves.

This newspaper thinks that sometimes misunderstandings about Bermuda's hospital arise because people are not familiar with the way hospitals work.

This Saturday is aimed at showing the King Edward to locals in a friendly way when they are not patients or visitors of patients. It is a chance to see how the hospital works "behind the scenes'', a chance to hear how things are done and a chance to learn how the hospital treats its patients.

We think that if locals know more about their hospital, its work and its problems, they will be more likely to appreciate its efforts than to criticise its failings.

It is true to say that the King Edward has always had a large number of supportive and hard working friends, notably the Pink Ladies, but sometimes it has seemed to be apart from the general community. A community hospital which the King Edward is, should, of course, have the support of the general community. Therefore, inviting people to come in and have a good look on a friendly rather than a professional basis could be very constructive.

We hope that people will take advantage of this opportunity to get acquainted with their only hospital and to get a little testing done at the same time.