Following the death of a Lummi tribal member and a letter sent by Tribal Chairman Anthony Hillaire stating Whatcom County EMS services are inadequate, county EMS manager Mike Hilley said the initial review of county data doesn’t support allegations of failing to transport tribal members to the hospital.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room to improve emergency response transportation protocols on the Lummi Reservation and around Whatcom County, Hilley said.
“We did review that a little bit because it was part of the letter … I’m not seeing that in the data,” Hilley said. “It doesn’t discount what has happened in the conversations, but we did look a little bit at that data just to determine if there was a big difference there and it doesn’t seem to be.”
The death of a Lummi woman in April was the “most recent of these incidents,” Hillaire revealed in a letter to city and county leaders, obtained by Cascadia Daily News. He claimed the woman’s death was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern “in recent years.” The allegations stemmed from ongoing concerns about EMS declining to transport patients when “transport appears to have been appropriate,” according to the letter.
Hilley made his comments during the quarterly EMS Oversight meeting on Wednesday, June 12. Whatcom County Executive Satpal Sidhu and Bellingham Mayor Kim Lund briefly spoke about a previous meeting they had with the Lummi Indian Business Council and Chairman Hillaire after the April letter was sent out.
Lund described the two-hour meeting as a productive and hard dialogue between city, county and tribal representatives.
No one from the Lummi tribe was in attendance at Wednesday’s oversight online meeting.
A public records request by CDN found that when either Whatcom County Fire District 8 or Bellingham Fire Department responded to an EMS call on the Lummi Reservation in 2024, at least 66% of patients were transported to the hospital, while 30% of patients weren’t transported and 4% of patients were dead on arrival.
The non-transport rate is down from 43% in 2023 and 48% in 2022, according to Whatcom County EMS documents.
Around Whatcom County, the non-transport rate, or left-at-home rate, sits around 48%, Hilley explained. That’s because of protocols created during the COVID-19 pandemic to ease overcrowding in emergency departments.
“The protocols gave EMTs and paramedics a little bit broader ability to leave patients at home for good conditions,” he said, adding there has been pressure from emergency room departments not to take sick patients there.
An investigation is being conducted into the April 18 events when the 36-year-old Lummi woman called 911 early in the morning to report that she had difficulty breathing, but EMS did not choose to transport her to the hospital, deeming it a panic attack after she was able to control her breathing. A few hours later, the woman’s husband called 911 to report her dead.
At the Wednesday, June 12 meeting, Whatcom County Fire District 8 Chief Bill Hewett was asked about the investigation status but declined to comment.
Hilley has requested more data from around the state to understand what left-at-home rates look like in areas comparable to Bellingham, the Lummi Reservation and Whatcom County, and if better protocols need to be developed.
“We’re always concerned about ‘are we under-dispatching or under-triaging patients out in the field’,” Hilley said in a follow-up conversation with CDN. “Even with a 30% non-transport rate out of Lummi, we want to know that we’re not leaving people at home unnecessarily.”
Work is already being done by EMS county-wide to address health issues in marginalized communities. The next batch of EMS students will have an opportunity to learn about tribal health issues from Lummi Health Executive Medical Director Dakotah Lane.
“We’re hoping to standardize that in future programs and classes,” Hewett said.
Lummi Nation has provided $420,000 in funding to Fire District 8 since 2023 for fire and emergency services. A review of Fire District 8’s budgets between 2018 and 2024 shows the district has steadily collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in contract fees from Lummi Nation for those services.
Update: This story has been updated with more information from Whatcom County EMS Manager Mark Hilley.
Annie Todd is CDN’s criminal justice/enterprise reporter; reach her at annietodd@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 130.
