Background

Emergency action protocols are a critical part of ensuring athlete safety during training and competition. An emergency action protocol enables any emergency aid provider, given adequate practice and preparation, to safely deal with most emergency clinical scenarios. When circumstances arise that are out of the conventional norm, employing a systematic approach is essential. One such approach to assess and treat athletes with serious or life-threatening injuries is airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure (A–E). These are the fundamental principle of emergency care taught in most sports-based resuscitation and emergency aid courses, such as The Footbal Association (FA) -Advanced Medical Management in Football course, Immediate Care in Sport course, and Emergency Medical Management in Individual and Team Sports course.1–3 Attending such courses is often a prerequisite prior to working in a sporting environment.

Sports clinicians do not deal with limb or life-threatening injuries on a daily basis as athletes are normally considered the healthiest cohort of the general population. Therefore, when dangerous clinical situations and pathologies do unexpectedly arise, human error, panic, inexperience of care providers, inadequate equipment, insufficient staff or simply poor planning and preparation can lead …