Prevention and management of sport-related traumatic brain injury among children and youth

The proposed project focuses on the prevention and management of traumatic brain injury (TBI) related to sports among children and youth. The project will consist in a series of workshops that will serve as a foundation for a future campaign directed at increasing awareness, knowledge, and behaviour needed to prevent as well as effectively manage TBI in young at-risk populations. The workshops will provide a platform for experts and stakeholders to share knowledge, ideas and best practices on the prevention, identification, and management of sport-related TBIs, and to discuss strategies for effectively communicating with children/adolescents and their parents about the importance of protecting young athletes from such injuries as well as adopting effective measures for timely recognition and management to avoid a severe course of TBI-related diseases. The project will bring together experts from various fields, including neuro-paediatrics, health communication, psychology, bioethics, health geography, epidemiology, and public health. Through this interdisciplinary collaboration, the project aims to develop a strategy of and preliminary design for a campaign to raise awareness and knowledge of sport-related TBI among children and youth in Switzerland and to motivate the adoption of behaviour to prevent, recognize, and manage such injuries. Workshop participants will bring together their diverse perspectives and methodological approaches to address this issue, which has traditionally been approached in a fragmented manner. The workshops will also involve various stakeholders, including paediatricians in private practices, representatives from local sports clubs and associations, Cantonal representatives for school/sport, parent associations, the Swiss Brain Health Initiative, the Swiss Federation of Clinical Neuroscience, the Swiss Olympic Association, as well as Jugend + Sport promoted by the Federal Office of Sports. By involving these stakeholders, the project aims to ensure that the future campaign is grounded in the perspectives and needs of the broader community, and that it has the potential to reach a wide audience. The insights generated through the workshops will further be used in the preparation of a research proposal for implementing the campaign and evaluating its effectiveness through a randomized controlled quasi-experimental study in Switzerland. The proposal will be submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).