Institutionalization of sports safety: lessons from Swiss youth sports promotion programme

Abstract

This study investigated whether instructors applied safety recommendations from the Swiss national programme for sports promotion, called Youth+Sports (Y+S), in training courses/camps with young people. Moreover, we analysed factors that affected the awareness and application of those recommendations. The analysis was based on an online survey of Y+S instructors and Y+S experts (responsible for training instructors), as well as interviews with the education managers of sport associations. We found that two-thirds of Y+S instructors were familiar with the safety recommendations in their sport, and nearly half of the Y+S instructors put the recommendations into practice. A key finding was that, in sports with special safety regulations, instructors had higher awareness and more frequently applied the safety recommendations in the practice. Differences among instructors were partly explained by the institutionalization of the safety recommendations for the sport. Thus, our findings emphasised the importance of a good educational system for successful implementation of safety recommendations in supervised youth sport activities. Compulsory guidelines for the education of Y+S instructors should be established on a high institutional level to guarantee the dissemination of preventive measures from the education managers (at the top) to the Y+S instructors (at the bottom) of sport associations.