Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center

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Information about project titled 'Injury surveillance in male professional football; is medical staff reporting complete and accurate?'

Injury surveillance in male professional football; is medical staff reporting complete and accurate?

Details about the project - category Details about the project - value
Project status: Published
Project manager: John Bjørneboe
Supervisor(s): Roald Bahr, Thor Einar Andersen
Coworker(s): Tonje Wåle Flørenes

Description

Introduction
FIFA, Fédération Internationale de Football Association, unifies 207 national associations and represents about 200 million active football players. In Norway about 7.5% of the population is registered football players, thus football is the largest organized sport in the country.

Football is responsible for one-fourth to one-half of all sports-related injuries in Europe (Hoy et al. 1992). The injury rates for adult male players vary between studies, in training 1.5-7.6 injuries/1000 hours and in matches 12 and 35 injuries/1000 hours (Dvorak and Junge 2000).  

Since the 2000 season, an injury surveillance system has been established by the OSTRC to monitor injury risk and injury patterns in the Norwegian professional football league.

 

The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of routine injury registration performed by medical staff in professional football.

 

Methods: The team medical staff will complete injury registration forms on a monthly basis throughout the 2007 season (January-October). Players will be interviewed at the end of the season (October/November) about all injuries that occurred from July through September. Fourteen teams, 310 A-squad players are interviewed.

An injury will be recorded when a player is unable to take fully part in football training or match the day after injury. Data collection starts with the pre-season training in the middle of January and ends when the competition season is finished in November.

These data will provide us with useful information about the validity of different injury registration methods used in practice, and will form a kind of golden standard for further epidemiology projects.