Study highlights the flaws in dealing with spinal cord injury in Australian sport
A study released today in the Medical Journal of Australia has many salient reports regarding the rare but catastrophic spinal injuries that occur in the football codes in Australia. Click here to read to full study. Some of the relevant points are: Spinal cord injuries occur at a rate of about 10 per year in Australia, with 39% becoming permanently wheelchair dependent. The most obvious preventative measure which could be, but has not been, taken is to reduce the level of contest in rugby union scrums. Since rugby league has had non-contested scrums there have been no scrum-related spinal cord injuries in RL in Australia. However, RL has its own problem to deal with of gang tackles, which are implicated in the mechanism of spinal injuries. The authors strongly make the point that they believe the compensation of spinal-cord injured footballers in Australia is grossly inadequate, with the average payout of only $300,000 (which compares to $7 million for traffic accident cases in males of similar ages). How to increase compensation without making insurance premiums for playing these sports prohibitive is not discussed. Currently, annual insurance against catastrophic injury costs about $30 per player in the rugby codes (to support the compensation levels now given). Obviously to improve the payouts ten-fold, the insurance premiums would need to rise to $300 per year, which might see a big drop in participation numbers. Again this is an area where the Federal government, which likes discussing the need for people to be physically active without actually having policies that might assist with this, remains silent.
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