Assessing medical care availability for student athletes of a large urban high school district

The need for medical care for student athletes is mounting, as participation in high school athletics is continuing to rise. This study assessed medical care available to high school student athletes in a large, urban school district in California that has not been studied since 2002. By surveying athletic directors and coaches, we expected to find inadequate availability of medical care in the studied district and predicted that care would be more widely available for student athletes at larger high schools.

We developed and validated a questionnaire assessing practice and game coverage, emergency preparedness, treatment, and injury prevention measures. The survey was administered to athletic directors and coaches at a school district athletic directors' meeting.

Forty-three (57%) of 75 distributed surveys were completed. We found that 70% of schools did not staff a healthcare provider for practices, 28% did not staff home games, and 30% did not staff away games, for any sports. We found no significant differences between school sizes with respect to physician referrals after a student was injured, provision of health education, or implementation of emergency action plans.

Although these data do not support our hypothesis of larger schools providing better medical care, it suggests that there are multiple areas of inadequate healthcare regardless of school size. We identified numerous gaps; thus, future work will examine the impact of these gaps.