Burden of Sport Injuries in the European Union - Safety in Sports

11 Conclusions and recommendations
66
11 | February 2012
11.1 Provide meaningful and comparable indicators for the burden of sport injuries
Within the sport policy sector and within the responsible national sports federations,
policies and programmes for injury prevention are not yet a matter of routine, although
the challenge is increasingly acknowledged as by the International Olympic
Committee when organising world conferences on the prevention of injuries. One
obstacle is the lack of valid indicators for the health as well as for the economic burden
of sport injuries.
As in all other areas of human activities, where accidents and injuries occur, indicators
for the magnitude (frequency and severity) are needed, which allow for comparisons
e.g. of
- Time periods (in order to monitor the development of risks over the years),
- Countries (in order to learn from countries with good records),
- Sports (in order to identify sports which the strongest needs for safety management
schemes),
- Groups of participants (in order to identify target groups with the strongest
needs of precautions), and
- Affected body parts (in order to identify priorities for the development of
measures and specific programmes).
There is a great wealth of studies on sport related injuries in the various sports
(handball, basketball etc.) and settings (training, competition etc.) allowing for the
conclusions on risk factors, injury mechanisms, and effective measures. Nevertheless,
these studies hardly allow comparisons, and if they do, comparability is frequently
restricted to specific sports, settings, or injuries (e.g. downhill skiing, school sport, or
head injuries).
The need for comparable injury surveillance systems has been identified in other risk
areas long time ago: work place, road traffic, and – more recently – home and leisure
activities. Some countries are already in the position to publish quite detailed statistics
on sport injuries, and most of them do it in a converging way. Nevertheless,
drawing a picture on the health and economic burden of sport injuries at European
level is still not easy and not satisfactory in many respects. The difficulties with completing
the current study, which is based on existing data at EU level as mortality