Development of the Sports Organization Concussion Risk Assessment Tool (SOCRAT)

ABSTRACT

Objective: In this paper, we describe the development of a novel tool—the Sports Organization Concussion Risk Assessment Tool (SOCRAT)—to assist sport organizations in assessing the overall risk of concussion at a team level by identifying key risk factors.

Methods: We first conducted a literature review to identify risk factors of concussion using ice hockey as a model. We then developed an algorithm by combining the severity and the probability of occurrence of concussions of the identified risk factors by adapting a risk assessment tool commonly used in engineering applications.

Results: The following risk factors for ice hockey were identified: age, history of previous concussions, previous body checking experience, allowance of body checking, type of helmet worn and the game or practice environment. These risk factors were incorporated into the algorithm, resulting in an individual risk priority number (RPN) for each risk factor and an overall RPN that provides an estimate of the risk in the given circumstances.

Conclusion: The SOCRAT can be used to analyse how different risk factors contribute to the overall risk of concussion. The tool may be tailored to organizations to provide: (1) an RPN for each risk factor and (2) an overall RPN that takes into account all the risk factors. Further work is needed to validate the tool based on real data.

KEYWORDS:

• Concussion
• sports
• risk assessment
• risk factors
• ice hockey
• FMEA

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the positive comments of the original manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Engage grant.