Sports medicine: Keeping child athletes safe

Playing sports is a great way children can stay active and healthy and develop skills like persistence that will help them throughout their lives. Sports are also incredibly popular among American children, with 54.1% playing at least one sport, noted Alex Diamond, DO, MPH, during a recent OMED CME session.

While many young athletes’ parents support their children playing sports, they are also concerned about injury risks and the quality/behavior of coaches, noted Dr. Diamond, who is a director and team physician at Vanderbilt Youth Sports Health Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University/Nashville Predators.

In his OMED session, Dr. Diamond shared actionable steps sports medicine physicians can take to reduce injury and promote healthy habits in youth athletes. Following is a summary; Dr. Diamond’s full presentation is available on the OMED On-Demand platform under the physical medicine and sports medicine tracks through Dec. 31. To access the presentation, search for “Minimizing Risk and Promoting Health and Safety in Youth Sport” and check the Content tab of the search results.

Dr. Diamond encourages sports medicine physicians to participate in advocacy opportunities in their communities to support providing youth with better access to care.

Focus on accident prevention

Throughout the presentation, Dr. Diamond shares how physicians can take steps toward improving the safety of youth sports and what standards we need to hold coaches and schools to. He encourages sports medicine physicians to focus on preventing accidents. One critically important way to help prevent accidents is to ensure coaches, parents and referees strictly adhere to rules and limit any illegal play—if you let things slide sometimes, they will more and more, and this can lead to preventable injuries.

To avoid this, Dr. Diamond suggests teaching proper fundamentals and technique, using protective equipment and participating in conditioning programs and educational campaigns.

“Safety cannot be delegated,” he says. “It is a shared responsibility of parents, coaches, youth athletes, safety advocates, sports leagues, schools and health professionals. We all hold the responsibility of prevention.”

Dr. Diamond also shared these additional tips for injury prevention in youth sports:

• Provide patients with evidence-based injury prevention program resources
• Encourage families and community leaders to implement risk reduction and health promotion measures as part of youth athletics
• Embrace (safe, positive) sport as a vehicle for physical activity and public health

Dr. Diamond’s talk is available on the OMED On-Demand platform through Dec. 31.

Related reading:

The joys of PM&R sports medicine

The importance of primary care sports medicine in the treatment of sports injuries