Why reporting minor injuries or near-misses is incredibly important for athlete safety.
When it comes to keeping athletes safe, every bump, bruise, or close call matters, even if it doesn’t seem serious at the time. That’s because reporting minor incidents (like a suspected concussion that turns out to be a false alarm) can help prevent major ones (like a serious concussion down the road) and prepare you for when they do occur.
Think of it like a roof: catching small leaks early can stop a flood. The same goes for sports safety. By tracking near-misses and minor injuries, we can spot risks before they turn into bigger problems. We can also ensure we’re prepared and practiced on following injury protocols when major incidents do occur.
Why Reporting “Negative Incidents” Makes a Difference
Negative incident reporting means logging events that didn’t lead to serious harm, like a player taking a fall but seeming fine or a near-collision that could have been worse. These might not seem worth documenting, but they’re actually goldmines for safety insights. Here’s why:
1. Better Risk Assessment
Consistently logging big and small incidents with complete data can help reveal hidden dangers. Maybe a certain drill leads to more close calls, or players keep getting dinged in the same way. Tracking these allows organizations to shift decision making from reactive guesswork to proactive and informed actions before someone gets seriously hurt.
Example: If three football players report pain after a particular practice drill, it might signal a need to tweak the drill, before a serious injury happens.
2. Smarter Prevention
When we record all incidents, not just the serious ones, we get an entire picture of what’s really happening. This helps leagues and teams spot patterns, make better safety decisions and act to minimize the chances of something serious happening. The reason a serious injury didn’t occur may have just come down to luck.
Example: A youth hockey player takes a hard cross-check but stays in the game after being checked for a concussion, though the hit was to the shoulder. If the team only logs confirmed concussions, this incident goes unrecorded. But by tracking suspected concussions, even when the player seems fine, they might spot a pattern, like most incidents stemming from a certain type of play. This data could then drive stricter rule enforcement to eliminate that play.
3. Avoiding “Survivorship Bias”
This term just means we shouldn’t only focus on the worst outcomes. If we only track serious injuries, we ignore all the near-misses that could have taught us something. This can lead to false conclusions, unfair bias, weak planning and misaligned solutions that address symptoms of a problem instead of the problem’s root cause.
Example: Imagine if a soccer league only tracked broken arms from falls. They’d miss all the times players slipped but caught themselves, meaning they wouldn’t realize how often the field conditions were a hazard.
4. Meeting Safety Standards
Many organizations require reporting of all incidents, no matter how small. Staying on top of this keeps teams compliant and shows a commitment to safety. It also enables the people responsible for athlete safety to be prepared for major injuries.
Example: A rugby team requires their coaches to watch a concussion education video before the season. However, it’s weeks into the season before a major incident occurs and they miss a few important red flags because they’re relying on memory in a pressure-packed situation. If they went through the protocol for minor incidents, they would have acted more confidently.
How You Can Help
You don’t need to be a safety expert to make a difference. Here’s what you can do:
- Report everything, even if it seems minor.
- Encourage players to speak up if they feel “off” after a hit or fall.
- Use reporting tools like HEADCHECK that make it painless to log all incidents.
By paying attention to the little things, we can stop big injuries before they happen.
Let’s keep our athletes safe, one report at a time!
Have you ever seen a small incident lead to a bigger safety fix? Share your story with us.
Latest from the HEADCHECK blog