Longtime firefighter Mike Soltwisch says he is a lot more tired after doing CPR today than he was several years ago.
He is not complaining. Soltwisch is now doing high-performance CPR, which, experts say, is saving more lives than the CPR protocols of the past.
"It's more labor intensive," Soltwisch said. "It's faster and you're really concentrating on depth and rhythm."
Soltwisch, a captain with Douglas County Fire District 2, is one of dozens of first-reponders in Chelan and Douglas counties who began doing high-performance CPR about five years ago. It calls for more chest compressions per minute and fewer pauses than CPR that had been the standard in the two counties for decades.
"We want to make sure we are doing almost perfect CPR," said Dr. Lance Jobe, medical director for emergency medical services in Chelan and Douglas counties and an emergency room doctor at Central Washington Hospital. "In the past, there have been a lot of pauses between compressions, with people looking at monitors and not realizing how much time they were off of chest compressions."