A recent Editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by O’Brien, Donaldson, Barbery, and Finch addresses an important element in injury prevention research: the completeness of the intervention reporting.

The RE-AIM framework can be used as a tool to facilitate the translation of research into practice. It can be used from the earliest phases of intervention planning, to reviewing funding applications, and is suitable for every domain of injury prevention. In addition, whilst the RE-AIM Model Dimension Items Checklist (MDIC) can be used to guide the reviewing of funding applications, it can also be used to determine the quality of injury prevention research literature. With the latter in mind, the Authors identified three critical questions:

1. Who is the intervention target? The target is not always the beneficiary, for example the injury prevention intervention may involve teaching risk management strategies to coaches, for the benefit of the players.

2. What is the intervention? Is the intervention the training/education provided by the researchers to the coaches? Is the intervention the intervention delivered by the coaches? Or is it both?

3. Who delivered the intervention, and were they under researcher control? Did the researchers, or the coaches as the delivery agents of the researchers?

This information is crucial in injury prevention research, particularly when it comes to identifying and then trying to remove barriers to effective intervention. Further, as the Authors note, “these factors all impact on the intervention’s generalisability and reproducibility.”

Read the article at http://bjsm.bmj.com.ezproxy.usc.edu.au:2048/content/early/2013/09/03/bjsports-2013-092913.full.pdf+html?sid=01d081c0-5d00-45b0-95b6-2897b3ed16d8

Read more about RE-AIM at http://www.re-aim.org/