Primary Survey Of Field Injury

When it comes to examining injuries, the two main settings where evaluations are performed are in the athletic training room and on the field. Although they both follow the same examination process, an on the field injury is more crucial and emergent. When it comes to acute examinations on the field, the first step is a primary survey of the injury which is then followed by a secondary survey if necessary. The purpose of the primary survey is to rule out life threatening injuries and starts immediately when you are approaching the suspected injured athlete. While walking up to the athlete, you are looking for obvious signs of movement and pain. When an athlete is moving or showing signs of pain, that is an indication that they are conscious, …show more content…
Being that the athlete cannot respond, your examination is more cautious because you do not know the extent of their injury. The athlete should not be moved around and you should not use excessive force or smelling salts to attempt to wake them up. When palpating to feel for gross deformities or bleeding, be brief but accurate to gage the severity. For example, if the athlete has massive bleeding and isn’t breathing, CPR should not be performed because it can make to bleeding worse. Being that the injury has been classified, asking the athlete about the history of the injury is not needed and stabilizing the athlete is your first priority. Another situation that is considered life-threatening is shock, which may happen from a variety of injuries but should be treated like a spinal or neck injury that will require head stabilization. The end result of the secondary survey will be whether or not the athlete will need to be transport and if so how they need to be transport. In some cases, the athlete can be monitored or splinted on the sidelines, in which they can wait until the game is over to be looked at by a …show more content…
Sometimes athletes may need to be splinted or have CPR performed on that, which is something that is not usually performed in the athletic training. When evaluating the situation, decisions are usually quick and conservative because the athletes welling being and even their life could potentially be in jeopardy. Also, the evaluation done on the field does not to be as precise when diagnosing and identifying the functional limitations as it would in the training