Healthy sport has to be safe sport
By Professor Caroline Finch
Participating in sport is only good for us, and for the nation, provided we don’t suffer long-term injuries in the process.
It sounds so obvious. But each year thousands of amateur athletes suffer preventable sports-related injuries at an estimated annual cost of $1.5 billion to the Australian economy.
As a researcher who specialises in injury prevention, what I find most frustrating is that we know how most sports-related injuries can be avoided. The problem is that communicating this know-how has proved to be an enormous challenge.
So while a research paper might say you could avoid knee-related musculoskeletal injuries by doing specific exercises as part of your training program, the chance of you having heard about such a prevention strategy is very low.
This is a big problem, which is likely to have many contributing factors. Not least of which is the culture that surrounds many popular team sports.
The ethos, and no doubt the adrenalin, which encourages participants to ‘harden up’ in the wake of a collision or other incident on the sporting field, is far from ideal. And it’s not only in sports like football and rugby where ‘hard knocks’ are considered ‘just part of the game.’
Physical toughness is often integral to sporting success. Some might even argue it’s un-Australian for participants to care about their wellbeing when their team’s or their personal fortunes are on the line.
While I don’t want to put a dampener on the courage and tenacity that defines the Australian sporting spirit, it is high time participants began taking the necessary precautions to ensure they leave the playing field fit and healthy, as opposed to on a stretcher, or destined for years of treatment for injuries that may not be immediately apparent.
They say necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, a group of researchers and policymakers felt an overwhelming need to do more in getting our knowledge of how to prevent sports-related injuries ‘out there’. The result is NoGAPS (National Guidance for Australian Football Partnerships and Safety) - a partnership between researchers, the AFL and an important body of stakeholders who want to put an end to needless sporting injuries.
Over the next few years the NoGAPS partners will work together to identify factors that influence the translation of research evidence into sports injury prevention. The study will focus on community-level Australian Football clubs because we know this is where many preventable injuries are taking place.
We have already started the process by looking at why information about sports-related injuries, and the existing guidelines for safe participation in sport, has been slow or simply failed to disseminate amongst the broader population.
It is alarming that, unlike professional sport organisations, community-level sporting bodies have been unwilling or unable to implement most of the interventions that we know, based on quality research, prevent sporting injuries. Of course, it is possible that this is because, whilst being very willing to ensure the safety of their players, they really don’t know what to take from the latest research.
By bringing together researchers and the key agencies that develop sport safety policy, NoGAPS will develop new insights into how we can build effective and sustainable safety policies and practices that will make a difference to ordinary participants where it matters - out on the sporting field.
Even though NoGAPS is looking specifically at community-level Australian football, we expect our findings will relate to other sports and will have relevance outside Australia. NoGAPS is being watched by a host of international spectators, equally eager to find out what the barriers are to people taking injury-prevention seriously.
We are not so naïve as to think we can fully achieve injury-free sport. Incidents with the potential to cause injury are a part of life, on and off the field. But where NoGAPS can minimise the harmful impacts of sport participation, especially those that can be avoided without any detriment to the game, it is determined to have an impact.
Caroline Finch is Lead Investigator for the NoGAPS project and Researcher Professor, and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, at the Australian Centre for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (ACRISP) at the Monash Injury Research Institute (MIRI).
NoGAPS arises from an NHMRC Partnerships Project grant and is administered through Monash University.