Sports
Maggie Rowland / The Dartmouth Staff
In response to concerns about a recent increase in head injuries across sports including major professional sports leagues, like the NFL Ivy League representatives are now collaborating to improve concussion prevention, detection and treatment in athletics, according to Director of Health Services Jack Turco.
Although still in its early stages, an initiative launched this month led by College President Jim Yong Kim and Cornell University President David Skorton will set an example for athlete safety in college athletics by developing recommendations and policies for safe play at practices and games, according to Turco.
A committee composed of Kim, Skorton, football coaches, trainers, doctors and other experts was initially formed to focus on football head injuries.
The program will now take the same basic principles and apply them to other sports, Turco said.
"We obviously don't want to exclude other contact sports," he said.
A major goal of the initiative is to ensure that sideline concussion tests brief exams that are intended to determine whether or not a concussion has taken place in athletes who have sustained head injuries are as accurate as possible so that concussed players do not continue to play while injured, Turco said.
The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine released a study advocating a new sideline concussion test that can detect a concussion in less than a minute on Feb.