If you have to get sick while in Door County, or if you must have an accident, Sister Bay is a pretty good place to have the experience.  That’s because EMS—Emergency Medical Services of Door County, maintains a manned station right in the middle of the Village.  The Sister Bay, (or North), EMS Department share quarters with the Sister Bay Fire Department.

Door County EMS maintains three units.  Home base is in Sturgeon Bay, and that station handles about 1,200 of the roughly 1,900 total calls per year.  The Northern Door unit at Sister Bay answers some 600 calls, and a unit at Brussels responds to the rest.

EMS of Door County employs a number of full time Paramedics, but that core group is augmented by some fifty fully trained but part-time Emergency Medical Technicians, and by about two hundred plus First Responders. A fully-credentialed Paramedic will have had some 2,000 hours of training, a First Responder sixty hours, and an EMT one hundred forty hours.

According to EMS Director Dick Burress, the Sister Bay unit serves elderly persons who are suffering from illness more frequently than it responds to accidents. That makes sense: Sister Bay, home of the Scandia Good Samaritan Retirement and Assisted Living Center, has the oldest average population among Wisconsin municipalities.

Burress has served over thirty years with EMS.  He had substantial influence in the decision to continue the “condominium” relationship that had existed with the Village firefighting force for a number of years when the Village was planning its new fire station.  “It has worked out well,” Burress said.  “We have separate ambulance bays and separate staff quarters, as is required with our 24 hour manned organization, but we cooperate in a hundred routine chores. The relationship has always been both amicable and useful.”