Musculoskeletal Injuries and United States Army Readiness. Part II: Management Challenges and Risk Mitigation Initiatives.

CONCLUSIONS: Standardized exercise programming has reduced trainee MSKI rates. Secondary risk reduction initiatives show promise for reducing MSKI-related duty limitations and nondeployability among AC soldiers; timely identification/evaluation and appropriate, early management of MSKIs are essential. Tertiary risk reduction initiatives show promise for identifying soldiers whose chronic musculoskeletal conditions may render them unfit for continued military service.Clinicians must document MSKI care with sufficient specificity (including diagnosis and external cause coding) to enable large-scale systematic MSKI surveillance and analysis informing focused MSKI risk reduction efforts. Historical changes in surveillance methods and injury definitions make it difficult to compare injury rates and trends over time. However, the U.S. Army's standardized injury taxonomy will enable consistent classification of current and future injuries by mechanism of energy transfer and diagnosis. The Army's electronic physical profiling system further enablesstandardized documentation of MSKI-related duty/work restrictions and mechanisms of injury. These evolving surveillance tools ideally ensure continual advancement of military injury surveillance and serve as models for other military and civilian health care organizations. PMID: 32107561 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Military Medicine - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Tags: Mil Med Source Type: research