The Play Safe Initiative (PSI)

Last week in Toronto, SIRC attended a Sport4Ontario hosted presentation by Brandy Tanenbaum from the Play Safe Initiative (PSI) with the RBC First Office for Injury Prevention at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (Sunnybrook RBC-FOIP). As a member of the collaborative Stewardship Group involved with PSI, SIRC has come together with organizations of all sizes and shapes, to commit to understanding and preventing injury in sport and recreational activities through research, education and collaboration.

Following the Ministry of Health Promotion and Sport’s (MHPS) lead in promoting the benefits of physical activity, there must also be a lead in injury prevention. While sports injuries are nothing new to those that participate in motor activities, there is now an urgent call from government and non-government organizations concerned about the significant personal, social and economic burden of acute and chronic injuries sustained by Ontarians as a result of participation in sport and physical activity.

The objectives of the Play Safe Initiative are:

• To collaborate by establishing a partnership of organizations committed to pursuing the objective of safe and healthy physical activity in Ontario.
• To learn by creating an injury surveillance system that is a secured web-based database that will enable comprehensive data collection, data storage, data processing, and reporting of results aptly named WISE™(Web-enabled Injury Surveillance Enterprise) and that can deliver timely information about injury prevention and injury treatment, and identifies resources for key stakeholders. In 2010, meetings with researchers from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, were paramount in producing the emerging technology and project development for the WISE system.
• To understand the facilitators and barriers of injury data sharing for key stakeholders

For the past 35 years, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto has been home to Canada's first and largest trauma centre, and is currently well positioned to help bring together, through their Play Safe Initiative, the various sectors and leaders to address the issue of injury in sport, recreation and physical activity.

For more information on sport injury and injury prevention contact SIRC!