State’s concussion bill draws fire over parental provision
I don’t believe HB 116 is in the best interest of the athletes.
A bill under consideration by the North Carolina legislature calls for the implementation of several measures aimed at improving safety for children engaged in high school or middle school sports. However, one provision has come under scrutiny, as it would allow parents of children thought to have suffered concussions to authorize their return to play.
A North Carolina law passed in 2011, called the Gfeller-Waller Concussion Awareness Act, included a passage regarding students participating in an interscholastic athletic activity who exhibited signs consistent with a concussion. Those students were to be removed from the activity at that time and not allowed to return to play or practice until they received written clearance from a licensed physician, neuropsychologist, athletic trainer, physician assistant or nurse practitioner.
The new bill, HB 116, keeps that wording but adds “the student’s parent or legal guardian” to the list of people allowed to give written clearance for a return to play.
More expansive than Gfeller-Waller, HB 116 would also require state and local boards of education to “educate those involved in school athletic activities on sudden cardiac arrest and heat-related illnesses,” and it would direct the establishment of “a database on the occurrence of injury and illness” by student-athletes.
Reaction to the parental provision was swift.
“I’ll preface by saying I’m not a parent, but I don’t believe HB 116 is in the best interest of the athletes,” Katie Flanagan, director of athletic training at East Carolina University, told Vocativ.com. “It gives the parents a determination that their child is fine and can return to play with a concussion.”
Tweeted New England Patriots defensive end Chris Long: “I have a bill: Any parent that wants to bypass concussion protocol at the high school level should be banned from games. Oh and public roads, businesses, etc.”
The NFL reached a settlement last year of a class-action suit brought by thousands of former players, who accused the league of misleading them about the dangers posed by concussions and other forms of repeated brain trauma. Earlier that year, a league official affirmed for the first time that a link exists between footballrelated brain injuries and the development among some ex-players of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), a neurodegenerative disease with no known cure.
Football players at all levels below the NFL are also increasingly viewed as being at risk for incurring brain trauma and possibly developing a neurodegenerative disease, causing concern among parents and medical professionals. However, while HB 116 calls for all parents of children playing high school and middle school sports to receive “a concussion and head injury information sheet,” few parents have the medical training to properly discern if a given child has recovered sufficiently from a brain injury.
The Canadian government took a major step forward in concussion care last October when it announced a $1.4-million investment to develop national guidelines for the management of concussions in amateur sport. Right now, there’s no common approach in Canada to address concussions, with protocols varying wildly from sport to sport and even from one side of a city to another.
Doctors say a formal concussion strategy is every bit as important as a helmet. Studies show concussions are three to six times more likely to be detected in an environment with a protocol in place. And the concussions that cause the most damage tend to follow the ones that go undetected when the brain is not given the proper time to heal and rest.
I don’t believe HB 116 is in the best interest of the athletes.