Serious sports-related injury in England and Wales from 2012-2017: a study protocol

BACKGROUND: Physical activity is an important component of healthy lifestyles, with a central role in morbidity prevention. However, sporting and physical activity also involve an inherent injury risk. Some sports and activities have a higher injury risk, and may involve more severe injuries. Furthermore, injuries of a severe nature have substantial individual and societal consequences, including the burden of assessment, treatment, and potential on-going care costs. There are limited data on severe sports injury risk in England and Wales, and no national data describing risk across sports. The aims of this study are to identify the cases and incidence of: i) paediatric and ii) adult severe sports injury from 2012 to 2017; and to describe injury incidence in individual sports. METHODS: This study is an analysis of prospectively collected sport-related injuries, treated from January 2012 to December 2017. Incidents involving a severe injury (in-patient trauma care) in England and Wales, will be identified from the Trauma Audit Research Network registry. Data for patients who were: transfers or direct hospital admissions, with inpatient stays of ≥3 days, admissions to High Dependency areas, or in-hospital mortality after admission; and whose injury mechanism was sport, or incident description included one of 62 sporting activities, will be extracted. Data will be categorised by sport, and sports participation data will be derived from Sport England participation surveys. Descriptive statistics will be estimated for all demographic, incident, treatment and sport fields, and crude serious annual injury incidence proportions estimated. Poisson confidence intervals will be estimated for each sport and used to describe injury risk (incidence) across sporting activities. DISCUSSION: This study will be the first to describe the number of, and trends in severe sport-related injuries in England and Wales. These data are useful to monitor the number and burden of severe sports injury, and inform injury prevention efforts. The monitoring and mitigation of sports injury risk is essential for individuals, health services and policy, and to encourage physically active lifestyles and safer participation for adults and children.