The SSI sports safety colloquium
The central tenant of SSI is that young sportspersons have the right to health and well-being, to be achieved by a balance of sports industry needs and safety orientated scientific knowledge and evidence-based actions. The program is founded on a solid base of sports injury epidemiology and proceeds by accepting that the interaction between science and politics plays a critical role in health affairs, and that sports safety should not excluded from this interplay.
Evidence-based sports safety policies
It is recognized that in addition to scientific evidence, public perceptions regarding the severity and solvability of the sports safety problem, responsibility issues, and the social position of affected populations all influence organizational and governmental responses. The SSI program aims to collate scientific evidence for identifying when large-scale transformation of sports safety policy can and should be implemented, thus dynamically highlighting the actual critical processes in the safety policy development. The program will also address how fragmented agencies, resistant commercial interests and other economic constraints, can lead policy-makers in sports to adopt a ‘minimal change’ strategy in safety policy rather than making comprehensive reforms when faced with urgent problems.
Sports communities, geographical communities and research
The SSI is adopting a working method which supports the formation of partnerships between sports safety researchers and socially defined sports-specific communities, addressing locally identified problems. In parallel, through co-operation with general safety promotion and injury prevention programs, SSI mediates alliances with geographically defined communities in efforts to develop safe local environments for physical activities. The program uses electronic media and the Internet strategically to reach its goals, as these have previously been successful as community mobilization strategies in health promotion. In doing so, it takes advantage of recent advances in technical designs for computer networks for the supporting of broad health promotion programs.
Sports safety promotion at the global health agenda
The formation of SSI is a direct response to the need to establish the sports injury problem as a critical component of general global health policy agendas, and to introduce sports safety as a mandatory component of all sustainable sports organizations. It is thereby recognized that the establishment of an explicit intersection between science and policy-making is necessary for the future development of all sports and the necessary safety gains required for participants around the world. Accordingly, the SSI safety promotion program is organized particularly to be active in this intersection.
- To bring community sports back into the health promoting ‘magic circle of gameplay’ – while also accommodating the pursuit of excellence - by developing a scientifically informed international platform that brings together socially and geographically defined communities having an interest in increasing sports safety.
- To advance the level of ‘industrial safety’ in professional sports - by distribution of information and empowerment of athletes, and supporting sports federations and other agencies with responsibility for the establishment of safe sports environments.
- To recognize and act on the synergies between global health promotion efforts and safety promotion.
- To advocate for, and promote, international efforts in sports injury prevention research that significantly contribute to the evidence base for the effectiveness and efficacy of all sports safety prevention measures.
- To care for the rights of child athletes to remain children (United Nations convention on the Rights of the Child, ILO C138)
- To assist developing countries in sports injury initiatives by disseminating information about the evidence-base on sports safety and by establishing international networks.
- To advocate for national and international policy, governmental and sports body formal responses to the sports injury problem
- To recognize that there are particular implementation challenges in the sports injury context which justify the employment of a context-specific framework for the transfer of research results to practice settings and to develop innovative methodologies to allow this to occur.
- To work towards the standardization of concepts and definitions such as sports injury and sports safety, as these are critical for adding to the research evidence base, the evaluation of implemented safety programs and the monitoring of both spatial and temporal trends in injury rates.
- To advocate for, and support where appropriate, the formal evaluation of sports safety programs, particularly those implemented in community settings.
