UK Sports Medicine Doctors Fail First Aid Course
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Thursday March 29 6:23 PM ET
UK Sports Medicine Doctors Fail First Aid Course

By Alan Mozes

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Almost two thirds of British sports medicine doctors do not know how to perform basic first aid skills for a seriously injured patient, according to UK researchers.

``This raises the question of whether the doctors concerned realise that...they have a professional obligation to be competent and up to date,'' the study authors write in the current issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The researchers, led by Dr. M. Lavis of the accident and emergency department at Nevill Hall Hospital in Wales, reviewed final exam results of 25 doctors seeking a diploma in sports and exercise medicine at the University of Bath. The exam tested the doctors' skills by using both a mannequin and a living person to simulate the occurrence of an accident--one that had the potential of resulting in a serious spinal cord injury.

The investigators found that 64% of the doctors could not competently perform basic life support, open an airway, rapidly assess the overall condition of the patient or effectively and safely immobilize the patient for transport to a health facility.

Also, one third of the diploma candidates failed to consider potential hazards at the scene of the accident--despite the fact that they were made aware of continuing potential dangers such as fire, falling rocks or flooding, the report indicates.

Lavis and colleagues further observed that the doctors seemed to actually dislike performing many of the skills involved in administering basic life support--defending their reluctance by saying that they would have done a better job if the situation were real.

However, the authors point out that, if anything, the simulated scenarios were not as difficult to handle as an actual accident would have been--and that even more of the doctors would have failed their exams in a more complex real-world environment.

``It is essential that all sports doctors are trained and competent in resuscitation skills, and the management of potential spinal injury,'' Lavis and colleagues conclude.

Emphasizing that doctors must be aware of their responsibility to their patients, the team caution that assigning under-skilled ``token'' doctors to cover sporting events places injured people in a compromised healthcare situation. The researchers suggest that all doctors looking after sports injuries need to be regularly retrained in order to improve and update their emergency care skills.

While noting that the study data was only applied to British doctors and not to sports medicine doctors in the US, Dr. Paul Thompson, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine, stated that he did not find the results surprising.

``It should motivate us to have similar studies done in the US and it should push us to think about special qualifications for sports medicine in the US,'' said Thompson, also the director of preventive cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.

Thompson was quick to stress, though, that ``sports doctors have to be excellent doctors. There are some people, however, who label themselves as sports doctors because they really don't want to deal with sick people. These are people who are into sports medicine but often do not keep up with critical care medicine.''

A main problem in the US, he told Reuters Health, is that there are very few formal sports medicine training programs.

SOURCE: British Journal of Sports Medicine 2001;35:128-130.