A new framework for research leading to sports injury prevention

SummaryThis paper proposes a new sports injury research framework, the Translating Research into Injury Prevention Practice framework, or TRIPP. This model builds on the fact that only research that can, and will, be adopted by sports participants, their coaches and sporting bodies will prevent injuries. Future advances in sports injury prevention will only be achieved if research efforts are directed towards understanding the implementation context for injury prevention, as well as continuing to build the evidence base for their efficacy and effectiveness of interventions. There is no doubt that intervention research in the sporting field can be difficult and many challenges need to be overcome; however, that should not be put up as a barrier towards undertaking it. Over the next few years, sports injury researchers will need to think carefully about the “best” study designs and analysis tools to achieve this. All reported sports injury studies, of whatever design, should include information on key implementation factors such as player/club recruitment rates and other biases as well as the rate of uptake of the interventions being tested, including reasons for use/non-use. However, it will only be broad research endeavours that adopt the TRIPP six-staged approach that will lead to real-world injury prevention gains.