This week we discuss a recent article from the Journal of Athletic Training which asserts transdisciplinary collaboration is required for high performing medical teams in elite sport. They introduce two "largely competing" models for athletics organizations: the high performance model and medical models. The high performance model places a performance director at the center of a team of ATs, PTs, physician, strength and conditioning coaches, dieticians, and sports psychologists. These high performance directors synthesize the information from the sport performance team and directly communicate with sport coaches and management. In contrast, the medical model has more siloing of medical staff and emphasizes autonomy of medical dicisions. This is "designed to minimize potential conflicts of interest that could adversely affect athlete health". The authors believe this distinction is relatively arbitrary: “We argue that the medical model is theoretically consistent with the high performance model only if we reject the notion that the ‘performance director’ is an administrative person and instead conceptualize this as a ‘health and performance information hub’ that facilitates transdisciplinary collaboration”. Instead, organizations should strive for a transdisciplinary approach to the sport performance staff where the team uses their experience and expertise to solve a problem through a shared conceptual framework. There is standardization to information and data flow, and although there may be different documentation systems, they all feed into a central system that allows for synthesis of the parts. The authors say it best: “Injury prevention is a team effort, requiring structured and trusted data sharing.”

The abstract can be found here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38477160/

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