Sport P.E.I. promotes new concussion guidelines aimed at protecting young athletes

Sport P.E.I. is promoting new international guidelines designed to protect young athletes from sport-related concussions, and to speed up their recovery and return to sport if they do suffer one.  

Many of the changes are focused around contact sports, including hockey, football and rugby. 

"They now are saying that mouthguards make a big difference — a 28 per cent reduction in concussions with contact sports," said Randy Goodman, Sport P.E.I.'s athlete health and performance director and a clinical specialist in sports physiotherapy.

"The other thing is reducing impact or collisions or hitting in hockey. If you reduce body checking in hockey in adolescents ... it reduces concussions up to 58 per cent of the time."

He said another prevention measure is "reducing full-hit practices in football so that you still do some, but you don't do a lot of it, and you save that hitting for the games."

Goodman said there are also updated tools for sideline evaluation of sport-related concussions, one for coaches and parents, and another for health-care professionals.

"They've recommended that you should do a fairly comprehensive assessment if you think the person's had a concussion. So you need to pull them out of the sport, get them in a quiet area and do a full-on concussion evaluation that takes about 10 to 15 minutes," Goodman said.

Another recommendation is that competition officials have health-care professionals present during events that are at a higher risk for concussions "to make those determinations, to make sure it's safe for the player."

Goodman said P.E.I. is gradually increasing the number of health-care professionals knowledgeable about sport-related concussions. 

"We have many more practitioners now who are