The three must-do's of intervention reporting: enhancing sports injury prevention research

Abstract

Injuries in team ball sports (eg, soccer, handball, volleyball and basketball) are common, accounting for 44% of all non-fatal sports injuries in the 27 EU Nations.1 Combined with high participation rates, this gives team ball sports the potential to pose significant health burdens, and highlights the importance of preventing injuries in this context. As neuromuscular injury prevention programmes for team ball sports gain increasing attention,2–⇓⇓⇓⇓7 the need to establish the effectiveness of these interventions in real-world sports settings has been emphasised.8–⇓⇓⇓⇓13 Conceptual models and frameworks from the broader field of health promotion can potentially facilitate the translation of efficacious interventions into practice, and examples of applying implementation science to sports injury prevention have been reported.9 ,14 ,15 The RE-AIM framework16 ,17 was developed to enhance the translation of research into practice, and has been applied in such diverse fields as falls prevention,18 weight loss19 and mental health.20 Recently, an extension of the framework specific to the community sport context, the RE-AIM Sports Setting Matrix, has also been developed (table 1).14 The RE-AIM framework can be applied across all research phases, from planning and implementation, to reporting and reviewing.17 However, there have been very few assessments of how RE-AIM has actually been used in any context. Recently, the RE-AIM Model Dimension Items Checklist (MDIC) was developed to assist the reviewing of project grant applications.21 This checklist comprises 31 items covering the five RE-AIM dimensions of Reach (4 items), Effectiveness (5 items), Adoption (8 items), Implementation (5 items) and …