May 30, 2016At Your Own Risk
Every athletic trainer’s worse nightmare is a tragedy occurring on their watch, but it’s not always easy to pinpoint potential risks. The NATA Secondary School Athletic Trainers’ Committee hopes to address this with the panel session, “Risk Mitigation for Secondary School Athletic Trainers” on Thursday, June 23, from 8:15 to 10:15 a.m. Each of the three presentations will address legal risks that accompany providing sports medicine care, with a focus on the high school setting.
Randy Cohen, ATC, DPT, Associate Director of Athletics for C.A.T.S. Medical Services at the University of Arizona, will kick things off with “Utilizing the NATA Liability Toolkit to Assess Your Risk.” This presentation will cover the role of the NATA Liability Toolkit for assessing liability coverage and identifying high-risk areas in high school athletics. At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be able to evaluate activities or areas that may risk liability coverage.
Next on the panel, Timothy Neal, MS, ATC, Clinical Education Coordinator at Concordia University Ann Arbor, will highlight risk issues that arise from cardiac screening decisions for athletes in “Cardiac Screening Considerations.” Outcomes for this presentation include applying recommendations and best practices related to athletes’ cardiac screens and managing the risk related to these testing decisions.
The final presentation on the panel, “Never Again,” will be given by Rhonda Fincher, Executive Director of Kendrick Fincher Hydration for Life. She will discuss her teenage son’s death from complications due to heat stroke sustained at a football practice and recount the legal battle that followed.
