“If it wasn’t for her, my wife wouldn’t be alive.”

That’s the call that Ryan Cusack, the public information officer at Lake County Emergency Communications, got after one of the 911 dispatchers in the area was able to help a woman perform CPR over the phone.

All Indiana emergency dispatchers will have a year to complete training in telephone CPR under a new law that took effect Monday.

Officials say at least 10% of the nearly 2,400 people working in 911 call centers around the state lack such training.

“We recognized that minutes are being wasted when people could be helping their loved ones,” Danielle Patterson, government relations director of the American Heart Association Indiana, told the Indianapolis Star.

Robert Lanchsweerdt, the director of the Porter County Central Communications Center said every dispatcher in the center is trained in CPR. He said every two years, dispatchers get re-certified in a classroom, and take a recertification for an EMD, emergency medical dispatch.

“It’s been this way for close to 20 years,” Lanchsweerdt said.

The Lake County dispatch falls under a 2003 law, which requires all dispatchers to be EMD-certified, part of which is telephone CPR. In their program, the initial training is 40 hours, followed by 24 hours of continued education every two years. Cusack said Lake County Emergency Communications received 378,000 911 calls last year, but it’s impossible to tell how many needed CPR.

“It might not be an everyday occurrence,” Cusack said. “But it happens quite often. We’re just that busy.”

Cusack said the reason it’s hard to figure out how many CPR calls the center gets is because the dispatchers don’t want to brag about themselves and tell supervisors when they’ve helped save a life.

“They’re such incredible workers, happy to stay out of the limelight and fly under the radar,” he said.

Jeff Schemmer, the executive director of Hamilton County Public Safety Communications, said he considers the training to be especially vital for rural areas, where emergency crews face longer trips to arrive.

“If we can get CPR started immediately, it increases the chances of survivability for an individual suffering a heart attack or cardiac arrest,” he said.

Schemmer added that his team is already skilled in telephone CPR and has been for at least 10 years.

“We have to have 24 hours a year to keep up our certification,” Schemmer explained. “So, there’s a lot of classes we have to continually go through whenever they update protocol.”

Ed Reuter, executive director of the Statewide 9-1-1 Board, said many staff members may know hands-on CPR, but this is different.

“It’s one thing to perform CPR with your hands on,” he said. “It’s also important to know how to describe that and take control of a scene that they can’t even see.”

Michael Clark, who works in emergency medical dispatch for the city of Lawrence, said dispatchers have a set of cards they can read from on such calls, though they often veer off the script to calm down callers.

“I try to establish a quick rapport, get their first name, be repetitive, say their name over and over again, tell them they’re doing a good job, try to help get them outside of the excitement of the situation and focus on the task at hand,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed.