TY - JOUR T1 - Towards evidence-informed sports safety policy for New South Wales, Australia: assessing the readiness of the sector JF - Injury Prevention JO - Inj Prev SP - 127 LP - 131 DO - 10.1136/ip.2008.021386 VL - 16 IS - 2 AU - R Poulos AU - A Donaldson AU - C Finch Y1 - 2010/04/01 UR - http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/16/2/127.abstract N2 - Policy-related interventions can contribute significantly to successful public health action.1 However, inadequate health promotion policy can result in: poor stakeholder engagement; responsibility division across government; short-term funding and unsustainable programmes; haphazard resource development and distribution; mixed messages; information overload; and a lack of standardised guidelines.2The need for safety policy in sport is well recognised, and there has been a recent call for global attention to the development of sports safety policy to ensure significant safety gains are made for all.3 This call has highlighted the need to better integrate the efforts of governments (particularly health departments) and sporting organisations, and to improve the sports safety “science to policy” interface. There are few examples of the development of national and state/provisional overarching sports safety policies, regulations, or strategic plans. In Quebec, Canada, the government adopted the Act Respecting Safety in Sport in 1979 and established the Quebec Sports Safety Board with responsibility for “supervising personal safety and integrity in the practice of sports”.4 The Quebec Sports Safety Board coordinates provincial sports safety activities, particularly focusing on developing and implementing safety standards in partnership with sports federations. In New Zealand, the Accident Compensation Corporation has established the SportSmart national sports injury prevention programme to systematically reduce and eliminate avoidable injuries by implementing and monitoring specific strategies.5In Australia, sports injury prevention has been on the national health policy agenda to varying degrees since 1994,6 but policy progress has been limited, and primarily focused on “micro policy” covering single issues (eg, drugs in sport, pregnancy, portable soccer goals, etc)7 8 or specific to individual sports, such as football codes.9 10In 1995, the Australian Sports Injury Prevention Taskforce was established, leading to the development of the Australian Sports Safety Framework in 1997,11 and … ER -