![Sample our Sports and Leisure journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5949/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Sports-Leisure.jpg"})
Abstract
Narrative text can be a useful means of identifying injury in routine data collections. An analysis of data from a near real-time emergency department surveillance system (NREDSS) in New South Wales (NSW, Australia) was conducted to determine if sports injuries can be identified from routine narrative text recorded in emergency departments. Around one-third of all emergency department (ED) presentations during 1 September 2003 to 15 February 2007 were identified as injury-related. Narrative text searching of triage nursing assessments using keywords identified between 282 (i.e. football) and 26,944 (i.e. play) potential sports injury presentations depending on the selected sports-related keyword used. Routine narrative text descriptions from triage nurse assessments show promise for the identification of sports injury presentations to EDs. Further work is required regarding in-depth assessment of case detection capabilities and the likelihood of improving the quality of narrative text recorded.
Acknowledgements
RM was supported by the NSW Injury Risk Management Research Centre (NSW IRMRC), with core funding provided by the NSW Health Department, the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, and the Motor Accidents Authority. CF was supported by an NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship. SB was supported by the IRMRC core funding and an NHMRC Postdoctoral Fellowship during the paper writing phase. Aspects of this study were funded by a grant from the NSW Sporting Injuries Committee. The authors wish to thank the Centre for Epidemiology and Research at the NSW Health Department for providing access to the NREDSS data, in particular Wei Zheng, and David Muscatello for comments on an early draft of this paper.