Melissa Saldana

KINS 154A
Instructor: Jennifer Park
December 3, 2015
National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Athletic Trainers
Concussion-Management Practice Patterns
Kelly C. Kassandra, Jordan M. Erin, Joyner A. Barry, Buckley A. Thomas. National Collegiate
Athletic Association Division I Athletic Trainers Concussion-Management. 2014;29(5):665-673
The article is called National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Athletic Trainers
Concussion-Management Practice Patterns was written by 5 authors they are; Kassandra C.
Kelly, Erin M. Jordan, A. Barry Joyner, and Thomas A. Buckley. What this article is about is
finding out what athletic trainers in the collegiate level do while assessing a concussion. What
this research lacks is the amount of responds they got back because it was not that high. It would
have been better if they got back a full or at least a high percentage for the athletic trainers.
The purpose that they had in mind while writing this article and conducting this survey
was to (1) describe the concussion-management practice patterns of National Collegiate
Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I ATs (2) compare these practice patterns to earlier
studies, and (3) objectively characterize the clinical examination.
The way that the subjects were selected was if they were athletic trainers for the NCAA
Division I institutions. That was the only requirement that they had for this survey was that you
had to be a certified athletic trainer working in the NCAA Division I. In the beginning they
emailed a total of 1890 and out of that total only 610 athletic trainers who participated in the
survey. Yet they the response rate was only 34.4%. Which is not really a high percentage it would
have been better if more if not all of athletic trainers would have participated.

The methods that were used during this survey was pretty simple they broke the
subjects/participants into groups based on what sex they were, how they got their certification,
the National Collegiate Athletic Association subdivision classifications, their job title, and what
sport or sports they did. The main outcome measures was the survey had 3 subsections:
demographic questions related to participants experiences, concussion-assessment practice
patterns, and concussion-recovery and return-to-participation practice patterns. Specific practicepattern questions addressed balance, cognitive and mental status, neuropsychological testing, and
self-reported symptoms. Finally, specific components of the clinical examination were
examined. The instruments/tools that were used to collect data were computers since the survey
was conducted online. So they just put the data they collected into graphs and tables.
Moving on, onto the results, the authors of this article said that they identified high rates
of multifaceted assessments in this case there were only 3 techniques that they used. There
was testing during baseline which had 71.2%, the acute concussion assessment had 79.2%, and
the third technique was return-to-participation which had 66.9%. Also the respondents endorsed
a lot of diverse clinical examination techniques that overlapped often with the objective
concussion-assessment protocols or it was used to out rule the associated potential conditions.
Also they found out that the respondents used the Third International Consensus Statement, and
the revised NCAA Sports Medicine Handbook recommendations. There was not much
difference between the groups they all went based off the multifaceted concussion-assessment
and the NCAA Sports Medicine Handbook.
The way this changed my knowledge for treating individuals with a concussion is vast
because in the beginning I was only aware of was checking the player during baseline to see if he
could return to play. I was unaware that there was actually different techniques to assessing

players. Although I knew that their must be more to assessing a player I was not aware of it in
great detail.
The three things that I learned from this project is always start on time, never waste a
moment thinking that you have enough time because nothing is as easy as it seems. The second
thing I learned was communication is a big thing especially while working in big groups, for
example in my group there was only 2 of us who were athletic training and the rest were physical
therapy. It does not matter that which section they belong to you should always communicated.
So if I could restart this project it would be to communicate more because for me ,I believed that
there were a lot of things that as a group got confused about or maybe it was just between the 2
athletic trainers. Since one of had to write this paper in AMA style and yet we still did not know
it was going to be. The third thing I learned from this group project was there are multiple
techniques for checking if a player may have a concussion and that many of the techniques
overlap. Now for 2 things that I learned while trying to find articles was that my professor was
not kidding when she said that we would have to go through many articles to find the right one.
In other words it is not difficult it is just very time consuming. The second thing that I learned
from trying to find articles for a specific injury was that even when you find the right or one
article you are still have some doubt, like is this the right article to use, is there an even better
one. When you are reading and trying to understand the research, you cannot just scan and look
at the results because when dealing with health field it can be very dangerous if one does not
know the full information, even the smallest mistake can change everything.I learned a lot about
looking up and writing research articles. These new skills that I have developed I will continue to
use them and develop them so that I can do better in future research projects.