Dispatchers saving lives with new CPR directive
A new directive from the Nebraska Public Service Commission requires all 911 operators to be trained in how to give CPR instructions.
By Bill Schammert
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WAHOO, Nebraska (KETV) — When someone goes into cardiac arrest, it doesn’t come down to minutes.
It comes down to seconds.
Camping is a Way of Life
Jasmine Buhr calls Papillion home, but her weekends used to be full of activities and camping.
“Kids love it and it gets them outside,” she said.
Camping was just a way of life.
“We don’t go to the camper much anymore,” she said. “It kind of brings back all of the memories of that night.”
June 25, 2024.
Buhr went to the doctor earlier in the day for a five-day migraine that wouldn’t go away.
“They disregarded my concerns,” she said. “They said it was from working outside, and they sent me home with a steroid shot.”
Buhr and her husband own a lawncare business, but as she would find out, her migraine wasn’t from working outside.
That evening, she, her husband, and some family friends were fixing their camper at Mahoney State Park to get ready for the weekend.
“I got done and looked at my husband,” she said. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
Buhr was in full-blown cardiac arrest.
Saunders County Emergency Operations
About 30 minutes outside of west Omaha sits the Saunders County Emergency Operations Center.
“It can be upwards of 12 minutes before a voluntary agency can get to a rural location,” said 911 Director Amy Meier.
Meier and her crew of operators dispatch for 18 rural volunteer fire departments.
“We’re more than just clerical workers,” she said. “We’re the first first responders.”
As of Jan. 1, 2025, there’s a new mandate for dispatchers in all of Nebraska’s 93 counties.
“The Nebraska Public Service Commission issued a directive for 911 centers to issue CPR protocol for telecommunicators,” she said.
That directive came in December 2023, with a training deadline of December 2024.
Meier, who had recently been hired as the director, started the training in February 2024. She was previously part of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Emergency Communications Center, which has established T-CPR protocols.
Now, all of her dispatchers are CPR certified, T-CPR trained, and revisit that training every six months.
“Within 90 seconds, we want hands-on chest providing those compressions, and we will walk you through it,” Meier said.
However, for most of Nebraska’s counties, telecommunicator CPR training wasn’t mandatory.
Now that’s changed.
“Our brains work differently under stress and pressure,” she said. “And when a family member is actively dying in front of you, I can think of no larger stress and pressure than that feeling.”
Jasmine Buhr’s Cardiac Arrest
A 911 call to Saunders County documented the next 20 minutes of Jasmine Buhr’s life. She was at campsite 106 at Mahoney State Park — not exactly the easiest place for first responders to navigate.
Frantic friends can be heard trying to figure out what’s going on.
Buhr can be heard gurgling and straining.
“It was craziness,” Buhr said. “The thing that gets me is the panic. She gets them to calm down and get the situation under control.”
That Saunders County dispatcher can be heard asking questions and calmly walking those friends through recently established CPR protocols.
“The CPR kept the oxygen and blood flowing until EMS got there,” Buhr said.
Between friends and first responders, Buhr needed 28 minutes of CPR.
She was diagnosed with four blood clots that shot from her heart to her lung and spent the next 10 days in the hospital.
“They told me that if CPR wasn’t started immediately, I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” she said.
CPR was instructed by a dispatcher who’d gone through telecommunicator CPR training just a few months prior.
It’s now standard policy across Nebraska.
“That link to someone who can help to focus on the task that needs to be accomplished until help can arrive is critical,” Meier said.
Buhr is now considered to be in heart failure and can no longer work. But doctors tell her if she follows her medications and avoids strenuous activity, she can still live a long life.
CPR has given her a second chance.
“I take every day, day by day,” she said. “It’s made me realize what all is important to me and why I need to be here.”
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