Concussion Assessment and Management Practices Among Irish and Canadian Athletic Therapists: An International Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Certified athletic therapists in Ireland and Canada serve essential concussion assessment and management roles, but their health care practices and concussion knowledge have not been established. OBJECTIVE: To examine Irish and Canadian athletic therapist cohorts' (1) concussion knowledge, (2) current concussion assessment and management techniques across all job settings, and (3) the association of concussion assessment and management practices with years of clinical experience and highest degree attained. DESIGN: Cross-sectional cohort study. SETTING: Online survey. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS: Licensed Irish (49.7%, n = 91/183) and Canadian (10.1%, n = 211/2090) athletic therapists. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Athletic therapists completed an online survey assessing their demographics, concussion knowledge (symptom recognition, patient-clinician scenarios), frequency of concussions assessed annually, and assessment and return-to-play (RTP) measures using a modified, previously validated survey. Symptom recognition consisted of 20 (8 true, 12 false) items on recognition of signs and symptoms that were scored as total correct. Descriptive statistics and odds ratios were used to examine survey responses where appropriate. RESULTS: Irish (86.8%, n = 46/53) and Canadian (93.4%, n = 155/166) athletic therapists indicated RTP guidelines were the most common method for determining RTP. Symptom recognition scores were 72.8% ± 17.0% among Irish and 76.6% ± 17.0% among Canadian athletic therapists. Irish (91.2%, n = 52/57) and Canadian (90.4%, n = 161/178) athletic therapists reported standardized sideline assessments as the most used concussion assessment method. Irish and Canadian athletic therapists' use of 2-domain (Irish: 38.6% [n = 22/57]; Canadian: 73.6% [n = 131/178]) and 3-domain (Irish: 3.5% [n = 2/57]; Canadian: 19.7% [n = 35/178]) minimum assessments (ie, symptoms, balance, or neurocognitive) was not associated with education or clinical experience (P ≥ .07), except for Canadian athletic therapists with master's degrees having greater odds of completing 2-domain assessments at initial evaluation than those with bachelor's degrees (odds ratio = 1.80; 95% CI = 1.41, 1.95). CONCLUSIONS: Irish and Canadian athletic therapists demonstrated similar concussion knowledge; however, most did not fully adhere to international consensus guidelines for concussion assessment as evidenced by low 2- and 3-domain assessment use. Athletic therapists should aim to implement multidimensional concussion assessments to ensure optimal health care practices and patient safety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".