Perceiving, reporting and managing an injury – perspectives from national team football players, coaches, and health professionals

ABSTRACT

Background

Injury perceptions and related risk-mitigating interventions are context-dependent. Despite this, most injury surveillance systems are not context-specific as they do not integrate end-users perspectives.

Purpose

To explore how Maltese national team football players, coaches, and health professionals perceive a football-related injury and how their context influences their perceptions and behaviours towards reporting and managing a football injury.

Methods

13 semi-structured interviews with Maltese female and male national team football players (n = 7), coaches (n = 3), and health professionals (n = 3) were conducted. Data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Results

Three themes were identified: (1) How do I perceive an injury? Consisted of various constructs of a sports injury, yet commonly defined based on performance limitations. (2) How do I deal with an injury? Encapsulated the process of managing the injury (3) What influences my perception, reporting and management of an injury? Comprised personal and contextual factors that influenced the perception and, consequently, the management of an injury.

Conclusion

Performance limitations should be used as part of future injury definitions in injury surveillance systems. Human interaction should be involved in all the processes of an injury surveillance framework, emphasising its active role to guide the injury management process.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports injury
• football
• prevention
• performance
• injury monitoring system

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Malta Football Association for providing the chance to conduct the study with its own stakeholders and Ms. Alessia Schembri for providing assistance in the translation of quotes from Maltese to English. This work was supported by the Maltese Tertiary Education Scholarship Scheme (TESS), however it did not have any role in the conduct of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors assisted in conceiving and designing the study: SV, IM, EV and CB. Data Collections: SV. Data Analysis: SV and CB. Data review and interpretation: all authors. Manuscript preparation, revisions and approval for the final version: all authors

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Tertiary Education Scholarship Scheme (Malta).