Injury Scheme Claims in Gaelic Games: A Review of 2007–2014

Context: Gaelic games (Gaelic football and hurling) are indigenous Irish sports with increasing global participation in recent years. Limited information is available on longitudinal injury trends. Reviews of insurance claims can reveal the economic burden of injury and guide cost-effective injury-prevention programs. Objective: To review Gaelic games injury claims from 2007–2014 for male players to identify the costs and frequencies of claims. Particular attention was devoted to lower limb injuries due to findings from previous epidemiologic investigations of Gaelic games. Design: Descriptive epidemiology study. Setting: Open-access Gaelic Athletic Association Annual Reports from 2007–2014 were reviewed to obtain annual injury-claim data. Patients or Other Participants: Gaelic Athletic Association players. Main Outcome Measure(s): Player age (youth or adult) and relationships between lower limb injury-claim rates and claim values, Gaelic football claims, hurling claims, youth claims, and adult claims. Results: Between 2007 and 2014, €64 733 597.00 was allocated to 58 038 claims. Registered teams had annual claim frequencies of 0.36 with average claim values of €1158.4 ± 192.81. Between 2007 and 2014, average adult claims were always greater than youth claims (6217.88 versus 1036.88), while Gaelic football claims were always greater than hurling claims (5395.38 versus 1859.38). Lower limb injuries represented 60% of all claims. The number of lower limb injury claims was significantly correlated with annual injury-claim expenses (r = 0.85, P = .01) and adult claims (r = 0.96, P = .01) but not with youth claims (r = 0.69, P = .06). Conclusions: Reducing lower limb injuries will likely reduce injury-claim expenses. Effective injury interventions have been validated in soccer, but whether such changes can be replicated in Gaelic games remains to be investigated. Injury-claim data should be integrated into current elite injury-surveillance databases to monitor the cost effectiveness of current programs.