The Injury/Illness Performance Project (IIPP): A Novel Epidemiological Approach for Recording the Consequences of Sports Injuries and Illnesses

Background. Describing the frequency, severity, and causes of sports injuries and illnesses reliably is important for quantifying therisk to athletes and providing direction for prevention initiatives. Methods. Time-loss and/or medical-attention definitions havelong been used in sports injury/illness epidemiology research, but the limitations to these definitions mean that some events areincorrectly classified or omitted completely,where athletes continue to train and compete at high levels but experience restrictions intheir performance. Introducing a graded definition of performance-restrictionmay provide a solution to this issue. Results. Resultsfrom the Great Britain injury/illness performance project (IIPP) are presented using a performance-restriction adaptation of theaccepted surveillance consensus methodologies. The IIPP involved 428 Olympic athletes (males: 250; female: 178) from 10 GreatBritain Olympic sports between September 2009 and August 2012. Of all injuries