From Evidence to Application: An Operational Extension of Existing Sports Injury Frameworks for Sports Medicine...

Injuries are an inevitable consequence of most sports; however, organisations can use sports injury frameworks to guide the identification, understanding, and reduction of injury and time loss. The present article aims to introduce an operational extension of existing sports injury frameworks and synthesise key concepts to support decision-making when implementing strategies to reduce injury burden within applied environments. Throughout the framework, explicit actions and methods for achieving the desired outcomes are provided. The sports injury framework is made up of four stages: (1) Understand: Develop knowledge of injury burden and context; (2) Identify: Apply causal logic to identify potential solutions; (3) Prioritise: Determine format and select solution; and (4) Deliver: Execute and evaluate the solution. This sports injury framework synthesises existing best-practice guidelines of understanding epidemiology, alongside the sports context, when addressing injury; the value of considering time loss in terms of both incidence and severity to identify target injuries; a structure in which to form theorised causal pathways and identify potential solutions, and a flexible process to select the appropriate format of potential interventions and prioritise them accordingly.