There's a saying in emergency medicine that if you can last seven years, you're a survivor. Dr. Carol Ferris, a senior doctor in the Emergency Department at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, has been there ten.

And she is probably the one doctor who has seen the department through most of it changes.

Dr. Ferris, 43, was born in Northern Ireland but spent much of her life in Yorkshire, England. She came to Bermuda in 1976 as a medical student, working in the hospital for just two months that year. She returned seven years later to take up a full time job as a resident doctor on one of the hospital's medical floors. A year later, she moved to the Emergency Department.

In her ten years in Emergency, she has seen the standards in the department improve dramatically. When she started, there was only one doctor on shift at any one time, and many of the doctors were straight out of medical school, with no emergency room experience. The nurses then had less responsibility, now they take patients' blood and administer intravenous drips. And almost all the ambulance drivers are trained emergency medical technicians.

"The hospital, and the staff, has spent a lot of time over the years trying to improve the department,'' she says."And I think the standards have improved over time. There's much greater screening of physicians coming into the ward. There were some very junior staff when I started working here. Now, the doctors are better qualified, and the nurses have more responsibility. The physical plant is very different as well. The department was much smaller, but then they moved it next door to this location in the late 1980s. Now, it is much bigger. If it's busy, I can walk a lot of miles in one shift. And in the beginning, there was this feeling of insecurity, because I didn't know where everything was - it was a little confusing. But it's much more pleasant, and cleaner-looking.'' Dr. Ferris, whose father was a family doctor in England, worked for six months in the emergency unit of a hospital in Jersey in the Channel Islands before coming to Bermuda. In the six months before that, she worked in anaesthetics at a hospital in Barbados. She left there when it became obvious the hospital and it staff were not treating patients properly.

At the end of August, Dr. Ferris will be leave her job at the hospital to work in the Health Department as the medical officer for the Prisons, Police, and other Government services. She is soft-spoken and is obviously compassionate about her work.

And she clearly gets satisfaction from her job. "The emergency ward is very variable -no two days are ever the same. You get a real sense of purpose.

Sometimes it's just the little things that do it, like when a patient thanks you.'' Though she loves her work, it has obviously taken its toll on her after ten years. "It's a high-powered, high-stress job, and I know I'm not coping as well as I used to. After 10 years, I am tired. I've always been known as the coper in the department. My life has completely stagnated. I'm not involved outside of thehospital but that's the nature of the job.'' The recent bad publicity about the hospital hasn't helped.

"Nobody's got a perfect hospital. We're always working to better the hospital and improve the standards. When you get complaints and the media comes down hard, it makes you feel very, very vulnerable. You want to defend yourself and the hospital. I think there is a very good standard of care given here.

"I think I've made the right decision to leave. I need a break. I need time to catch myself. I may get back into emergency medicine sometime. I will miss the department. I know I will cry when it's time to go. When you work in a job like Emergency, you give your all. It is part of your life.''