The knowledge and attitude of sports injury prevention and management of senior high school athletes in Taiwan

[[abstract]]Sport injury has been identified as one of the major adolescent health problems. This study investigated the current level of knowledge and attitude of sports injury prevention and management (SIPM), and the correlations between the demographic factors among senior high school athletes in Taiwan. The population covers a total of three hundred school athletes who accepted the survey and were selected with purposive sampling from the school athletes of seven public and private senior high schools in Hsinchu County. Data were collected with self-administered questionnaires. 86.0% participants had sports injury history in the last year; gender (p<.001), type of school (p<.001), grade (p<.01) and total practicing days a week (p<.01) was statistically significant in SIPM knowledge. All participants believed that none of the sports injury related courses provides adequate knowledge; and the highly positive correlation between knowledge and attitude of SIPM was found (r=.608, p<.001). We suggest that the higher risk group of sports injuries, such as school athletes will be deprived from learning more about sports injury prevention and management. The training of high school teachers and coaches will likely increase students' knowledge and influences their attitudes then motivate their practice to keep health