PHOTO: The topic of concussion is firmly on the table. IMAGE: concussioninsport.gov.au
Amateur athletes who incur head injuries while playing sport are often left permanently impaired and uncompensated in games without clear concussion guidelines according to several high profile groups.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says more than 2,300 sports head injuries led to hospitalisation in the 2019-20 period and 80% of those involved concussion.
Sporting concussions exist in both a kind of legal, regulatory and medical no-man’s land – the long-term impacts of concussion are not entirely known, there are no national guidelines for sporting organisations on how to prevent or deal with concussions, while legally the question of liability remains somewhere between uncertain and uncompensatable.
On 1 December 2022, the Senate referred an inquiry into concussions and repeated head trauma in contact sports to the Senate Community Affairs References Committee for inquiry…