Concussions in contact sports are challenging for athletes, health professionals and sporting bodies to prevent, detect and manage. Design of interventions for primary prevention, early recognition of concussion and continuing to improve postconcussion management are essential for protecting athletes and promoting brain health. Over the last decade, there have been advancements in video technology for analysing head impact events and improvements in the clinical management of concussions. This study protocol describes how researchers, clinicians and staff from the Australasian National Rugby League (NRL) have brought these advancements together and developed a database of videos with head impact events and clinical outcomes. The intended outputs from this work will enhance the understanding of head impact events in NRL, from biomechanical and gameplay factors to concussion and return to play outcomes. Publishing this protocol increases the transparency of this large-scale effort to better identify head impacts and their relationship to concussions and player movement behaviour to contextualise these variables to generate new knowledge and support the reproducibility of these emerging findings. Between 2017 and 2023, over 5250 head contact cases were recorded in the database, from which >1700 head injury assessments were performed, and >600 concussions were diagnosed. Future studies using these data are planned to inform both primary and secondary injury prevention initiatives, such as risk analysis and prediction of game scenarios that result in concussion, as well as investigation of features and factors that help to inform the duration of recovery and return to play.
Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are increasingly being adopted as an assessment tool by medicine and other health professions in a bid to enhance competency-based health professional education. EPAs are well-defined professional activities that can be entrusted to students to perform with varying levels of supervision. They were introduced to overcome some of the limitations of traditional assessment methods of competency such as individual skills assessment or Direct Observation of Procedures and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations. Could EPAs be beneficial in Australian and New Zealand optometric clinical education for advanced skills training and accreditation including the credentialing assessment of overseas educated practitioners? This paper discusses the historical context of how competencies were introduced and assessed in Australian optometry, the evolution of the concept of EPAs in medicine and other health professions, their design and implementation worldwide and whether EPAs could be adopted into optometric training and assessment in Australia and New Zealand.
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