P<$>ERHAPS it is fitting that I am in the place that I am while writing this particular Commentary<$>. Last week Government announced that King Edward VII Memorial Hospital is going to be phased out and a new, custom-built hospital would be going up in the Botanical Gardens. There’s been a predictable outcry in the community and this week I intend to weigh in on this debate. And, that’s right, as you might have guessed by now I’m back in King Edward, composing this column from my hospital bed.

After the big public confession on my part less than nine months ago — in which I claimed to have supposedly learned my lessons when it came to controlling my diabetes — I’ve been ill again.

I must say it was less distressing this time compared to the drama surrounding the first time I was sick. But, in general terms, the experience has been less disconcerting — especially given that the nurse has just put in another IV drip and I have been told that I will have to keep my arm stretched out so that the medicine can flow down.

So I am typing in a one-handed sort of way.

Over the last two years I have been in the hospital no fewer than three times, including this latest incident, so you might say at this point I have something of a vested interest in the future development of the facility (and let’s not forget about my weekly trips to the hospital wound centre. I told the head of that important medical department that I was going to put a word in to get her a new office, one that does not have to double as a patient care area, which prevents her from carrying out her duties).

In fact, her situation is just one small example of why we need a hospital. They need space — space so that our medical care people can have the room to carry out their duties for the rest of us.

Do not delude yourself that you are going to have the good fortune of going through life having no need of the hospital. We all get our turn sooner or later — some of us get more turns than we care to remember.

Getting back to the wound centre, the waiting area is shared with another important treatment zone, the Diabetes Centre.

Did I say “waiting area”? I should have said it’s a small waiting area — a very, very <$>small area, more like a glorified broom closet than a waiting room. The Diabetes Centre, too, could use more space which would allow it to do much more in coming to grips with Bermuda’s silent endemic.

There is another area that could use vastly more space and that is the Emergency Department. Sometimes there is a long line of patients waiting for beds in the main hospital and the Emergency Department, in fact, becomes a sort of mini-hospital where people are deposited until beds on the wards become free. That’s not right.

Over the years, unfortunately, I have become very familiar with all of these areas of the hospital and so I have a great deal of sympathy with the Bermuda Hospitals Board’s need for a bigger medical facility.

I have spoken of the Board’s needs because I see we are about to start playing politics with the situation — as we always seem to do with most of the important issues facing this country.

I saw the Opposition Leader on television the other night talking about the recently unveiled plans for the new hospital. He’s afraid about Government’s ability to handle such a major capital project, citing the runaway costs associated with the now completed Berkeley Institute.

Somewhere else I saw that former United Bermuda Party leader Grant Gibbons was talking in terms of where the money is going to coming from to finance the new project. Then we hear the well-publicised concerns of the environmental lobby, all in line ready to attack, to criticise on all levels.

Well, you know what, Bermuda? Although we like to boast that we are the third richest country in the world, why then is the physical plant of our hospital in such a shoddy state of repair? There are better hospital facilities in far less developed countries (and this is not a put-down to my Third World brothers and sisters for since Bermuda joined the list of economically better-off countries, we too have been raiding the medical expertise of developing countries that need their doctors and nurses far more urgently than we do — a situation I am very ambivalent about despite having benefited from).

From an environmental perspective, I am also concerned about the perceived loss of more open space that will result from building a new hospital at the Botanical Gardens. The country I grew up in was a lot greener than the one I live in today.

However, let’s be real. The entire area around the hospital — and the Botanical Gardens — has been taken over by medical facilities and doctors’ offices. It has, in fact, become a small medical town. The building of a new hospital in this vicinity should be viewed as yet one more step in an ongoing process of centralising our medical care facilities. Interestingly<$>, we have not heard any complaints about the fact medical offices have been gradually replacing private homes in the area. We’ve just accepted the situation as sensible — a necessity. And that’s the way we should look at the new hospital.How are we going to finance this project? Well, people gave up complaining about the hospital levy that still takes a bite out of their pay cheque (although now it goes by another name) long after the existing King Edward VII Memorial Hospital was completed in 1965.

Nothing comes free, we will have to pay. As to the siting of the new hospital? Well, if you don’t like the idea of the Botanical Gardens being built on, I have an alternative site in mind — one I have mentioned before.

Move the Governor and his wife out of Government House and build a new hospital complex there. But if you want to continue to glory in the fact that you are a British Overseas Territory and keep on maintaining that 40-acre property, then it’s your choice, Bermuda.

So there you have it. One thing is for sure, whether we like it or not we need a new hospital. To those who might have qualms about this new Government capital project, I only have one thing to say: Get over it!