Grant: Project Grant

Sport-related injuries pose a significant health burden on individuals and our healthcare system (estimated cost of $228 million annually). Injuries can reduce physical activity, increasing the risk of chronic conditions, and mental health challenges. Concussions can severely impact daily activities and multiple concussions may result in long-term learning difficulties and decreased brain function. Validated injury surveillance is a crucial step for understanding what situations lead to injuries and how often they occur so that we can better target prevention strategies. However, there is currently no standardized system to determine injury rates and risk factors in the Canadian university varsity population (including >20,000 student-athletes). The Canadian Integrated Injury and Health Surveillance System (Can-IIHSS) research program aims to inform the prevention, early-identification, and prediction of risks for all injuries amongst Canadian university athletes. We have partnered with U SPORTS, the university sport governing body, university clinics, and industry partners to use a surveillance system that can collect data on injury and concussion risk factors for university athletes by sex, gender and sport. We will use this system to improve our understanding of injury and concussion rates, mechanism and severity, changes in injury rates and risk factors over 3 years. This system will address a gap in the Canadian literature on injury. Canadian varsity athletes have high risks for injuries and concussion making them an important population for evaluating targeted injury prevention programs. The Can-IIHSS national network of clinicians and researchers working collaboratively to provide ongoing injury analyses can serve as a catalyst for future research questions enabling an easily accessible population to test new evidence-based innovations in injury prevention and inform solutions for Canadians at large.