Sports medicine is now recognised as a specialty in some European countries. As an emerging discipline, sports and exercise medicine needs to develop a solid academic footing if it is to gain acceptance by the Royal Colleges in Great Britain and Ireland. A higher professional university degree is a requirement for work in sports and exercise medicine clinics abroad, especially schemes associated with the Fellowship of the Australian College of Sports Medicine. Health insurance companies, professional athletes, and teams now demand a much higher standard of care from their sports physicians, and this makes the higher status of further postgraduate university qualifications even more important.

In Great Britain and Ireland, practitioners engaged in masters programmes develop an understanding of training methods from a wide variety of sports and the prerequisite knowledge to monitor and optimise the …