Amid the distressing loss of National Endowment for the Arts funding, May has also brought several major healthcare breakthroughs on Vashon.

Both Sea Mar and the Seattle Indian Health Board announced last week the receipt of long-awaited approval from King County to embark on major construction projects to build, respectively, an in-town primary care clinic and the Thunderbird Treatment Center.

These projects have faced the arduous county permitting process and come out on the other side. They’ll provide desperately-needed healthcare to islanders, to Indigenous people, and to our regional community. Between Vashon Natural Medicine and Sea Mar, islanders have two quality, professional primary care providers, but the demand for more care is acute.

These are wins for the community — and we eagerly await future milestones in their development.

In the meantime, this week’s edition of The Beachcomber includes a chart laying out who to call for medical events, divided by primary, urgent, emergency and other kinds of care. (See page 10.)

Islanders have asked us for nearly half a year to produce such a chart, and we tried repeatedly throughout the spring and winter last year to do so. But seemingly-insurmountable disagreements between our island healthcare taxing districts — Vashon Island Fire & Rescue and the Vashon Health Care District — ground those efforts to a halt. We couldn’t come up with a simple breakdown that the leaders of both agencies could agree to, and the last thing we wanted to do was publish information that is inaccurate or which delays people from getting the level of care they need.

After fruitful meetings between the leaders of these healthcare agencies — efforts that should have happened much sooner last year — the districts have finally reached an accord.

We say: Hallelujah. This is a critical time for our public agencies to row together. Too much is at risk federally for the lives and safety of our island’s seniors, youth, vulnerable adults and everyone else.

Ultimately, the Vashon community is the biggest beneficiary of all these developments, which will bring more healthcare to the island: More primary care. More addiction care. More urgent care. More preventative and proactive care.

Finally, we say thank you to the nurses, firefighters, doctors, therapists, dentists, pharmacists, counselors, physician assistants, social workers, Traditional Indian Medicine experts and other healthcare providers who are working, or will soon be working, to heal our community.