EIS Medical Support for Modern Pentathlon
The EIS provides all of its services on a regional basis. Nominated athletes can access Sports Medicine and Physiotherapy advice at any of the regional centres.
The EIS Sports Physicians come from a variety of medical backgrounds and all have qualifications in Sport and Exercise Medicine. Many of them have a role as GB team doctor to one of the Olympic Sports.
One of the key areas in which the EIS can excel is by using a multidisciplinary team of Sports Physicians, Physiotherapists, and Strength & Conditioning Coaches to optimise recovery from injury. Many sports injuries are relatively easy to diagnose; the difficulty is often in understanding the weakness or poor technique that caused the injury. The medical teams work with the S&C coaches and the technical coaches to determine the cause of an injury and provide a sports specific training programme to prevent recurrence.
Good communication between doctors and therapists is an essential part of providing good medical support. The EIS uses an electronic medical records system Injury – Zone which allows the records to be read and added to at any of the EIS sites. If an MP athlete is seen at one of the centres I receive an e-mail advising me to check the medical record entry. Injury Zone is a secure system that can be accessed anywhere in the World. This means that as the doctor to the GB Team training in France for the recent Olympics I could access all the records on the system. When the athletes moved on to Athens the doctors had access to all of the medical records including my notes from the training camp.
As part of an injury prevention programme I hope to be setting up a pilot study with an internet based medical questionnaire for all funded MP athletes in 2005 to help identify any potential medical or injury problems before the athletes progress to the high performance training group.