TY - JOUR T1 - Sports medicine leaders working with government and public health to plan a ‘return-to-sport’ during the COVID-19 pandemic: the UK’s collaborative five-stage model for elite sport JF - British Journal of Sports Medicine JO - Br J Sports Med SP - 4 LP - 5 DO - 10.1136/bjsports-2020-102834 VL - 55 IS - 1 AU - Simon Kemp AU - Charlotte M Cowie AU - Mark Gillett AU - Richard Higgins AU - Jerry Hill AU - Zafar Iqbal AU - Paul Jackson AU - Rod Jaques AU - Jo Larkin AU - Gemma Phillips AU - Nicholas Peirce AU - James Calder Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/1/4.abstract N2 - The WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11 March 2020.1 On 20 and 23 March 2020, faced with a rising number of both COVID-19 cases and deaths, the UK government imposed a range of measures in an attempt to control the pandemic in the UK. Although individuals were allowed to run and cycle outdoors, these instructions effectively put sport on hold, resulting in widespread training disruption to the elite athlete population.The chief medical officers of many of the major Olympic, Paralympic and Professional Sports in the UK formed a group to share thinking around how elite sport might best plan for a return at the appropriate time. While it was acknowledged that there were fundamental differences between the sports, including but not limited to current and future competition schedules, financial and personnel resources, potential risks of COVID-19 transmission between participants and their ability to align with any relaxation of population social distancing (SD), a collaborative approach to planning ‘how’ elite sport might restart was agreed to be the most effective manner to inform a single dialogue with government and Public Health England.Central to this approach was the development of a five-stage model (figure 1) that set out the discrete stages that sport would need to progress through, to ultimately return to unrestricted competition, starting with stages with a lower risk of COVID-19 transmission. It was hoped that this model would help create a consistent taxonomy when … ER -