Substantiating quotes from interviews with Olympic stakeholders in Australia and South Africa to the theme of ‘dissemination, awareness and access’
| Generally limited awareness | ||
| 1 | Yeah, this is tough… because you're supposed to know about these things…. I don't think we know it actually exists… | South African interviewee 6 |
| 2 | I don’t actually know exactly where they're published. I would imagine in a sports medicine journal. I think that they are available, I think I have seen them available at the Games. I think that when you go to the information counters and things you can get those Statements there, the ones that have already been published. | South African interviewee 4 |
| 3 | I don't know a lot about the IOC medical statements, to be honest. | Australian interviewee 1 |
| 4 | Really, I hadn't considered it, didn't realise they existed and certainly haven't been presented with any Consensus Statements. We don't see what we don't look for. If we don't know it’s there, then we don't go looking for it. If nobody brings it to our attention… | Australian interviewee 3 |
| Awareness depends on the topic relevance at the time, treating population or topical issues | ||
| 5 | The rest would have been when I was doing research on a topic. So, if I was looking up- the female athlete triad, or things like that, then I would come across the IOC Consensus Statement. Those - really, that’s mainly where it would come up. On my own independent research. Then I would read up. I didn’t really - read very much around the topics that I am not presented with. | South African interviewee 7 |
| 6 | So, I suppose my attention focuses on the ones that are relevant to that population that I treat. Like recently I gave a talk on (topic removed for confidentiality) and so I'm aware that there’s one that’s there because obviously when I was researching in preparation for that then I stumbled upon it. | South African interviewee 1 |
| 7 | Probably it waxes and wanes depending on…so I think ‘heat’ would be a really interesting one, you know, leading into Tokyo and then that might peter out a bit. There’s been a lot of publicity about transgender and a lot of sports developing transgender policies with the rise of female professional sports in Australia. I think that one’s a really - and I’ve listened – the MJA’s (author insert: Medical Journal of Australia) got a good transgender podcast from the children’s hospital down there and things too. I think things go through waves according to what’s happening a bit in the media a bit. | Australian interviewee 4 |
| 8 | Many of them I've never seen, either. Yeah. I know the concussion ones; we know those quite well. | South African interviewee 6 |
| A wealth of resources and limited time influences awareness | ||
| 9 | But equally our SMA have got statements in that regard. Our college, the ACSEP (author insert: Australasian College of Sport and Exercise Physicians), has got statements in that regard. British, oh, BASEM (author insert: British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine) is the British group. There’s so many. As I said, you're competing against a lot of others… | Australian interviewee 2 |
| 10 | I haven’t looked into it to be honest, so I don’t think if I'm going to prepare something or give a talk on something or whatever, I don’t think oh, I must get the IOC. I will go to the literature and do a Google search in Google Scholar. If it comes up on there, of course. | Australian interviewee 6 |
| Difficulties with search strategy, accessibility or IOC branding | ||
| 11 | I thought I saw on the website about 10 - was off the top of my head roughly, but I’m not sure if they are all available on the website. Maybe I looked in the wrong spot? But again, if there’s that many, they should be - clearly one of the things is they should be accessible and visible and easy searchable. I didn’t see any other - I’m wondering where they all are? But again, things are only useful if they’re accessible. | Australian interviewee 5 |
| 12 | You get Statements about cardiac abnormalities and ECG screening and these sorts of things. But whether or not that was an IOC Statement or a Statement from other colleges, I'm not sure. So, the IOC Statements don't stand out from other ones particularly. | Australian interviewee 1 |
| 13 | For me it’s a problem because I’m not necessarily affiliated to the university and it’s actually - it’s quite hard to get information easily, where you’re not paying a fortune. I rely them - then on them to get give me any information and they pass on quite a bit. If they come across stuff, they’ll pass it onto me. But for me, I think information access is one of my problems, to be honest, of getting up to date stuff because I don’t have access to everything. | South African interviewee 7 |
| Personal responsibility to disseminate and enhance access for others | ||
| 14 | …I blame myself after I've been ignorant…Have I ever thought about sharing with other people, sharing with athletes? No, I didn't until today, so I blame myself. | South African interviewee 2 |
| 15 | It’s ethically disturbing to me to know - it would disturb my sleep to know that these things are not getting to doctors who are going to work with our athletes. It’s worrying. It’s extremely worrying, and we also - if I look at Africa, because we probably would be more advanced in South Africa than the rest of Africa, and then I'm even more worried about them… when I randomly meet doctors from Africa at conferences, they're so desperate for knowledge. | South African interviewee 3 |
| 16 | People need to take up the challenge themselves. Look, I mean, fortunately I have been in the system for a while so it’s part of my thinking to do it, but I'm not going to go around - well, I go to federations here and I'm hoping that the federations provincially will disseminate that up. | South African interviewee 5 |
| Professional networks and sports medicine platforms as facilitators of awareness and access | ||
| 17 | Some of our colleagues who are doing part-time sports but are closely linked to universities…we've got our colleagues who are studying and as soon as they see something interesting, they post it on the group. So, for now, if I don't go and search for myself, we get information from the WhatsApp group. | South African interviewee 2 |
| 18 | The way I read them now is I follow BJSM on my Twitter feed and so I can - I’m aware of when new consensus statements get released | Australian interviewee 5 |
| 19 | I follow BJSM on Twitter and through SASMA as well…because then I will get sent them specifically, read them, and then distribute them to my networks if relevant, I mean BJSM has been very good in positioning the statements and the talk that happens around it from a social media point of view, and also with some of them and I'm just trying to think which ones if I mean this is true, things like infographics make it a lot more accessible to the person on the street and even just in terms of translating the message. | South African interviewee 1 |
BJSM, British Journal of Sports Medicine; IOC, International Olympic Committee; SASMA, South African Sports Medicine Association; SMA, Sports Medicine Australia.