Demographic and epidemiologic trends in sports medicine outpatient clinic visits: Tale of an expert

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the demographic and clinical characteristics of patient admissions to an outpatient clinic of Sports Medicine within a 1-year period after Novel Coronavirus Disease-2019 pandemic. Materials and Methods: The files of all patients who admitted to the outpatient clinic between April 2022 and April 2023 were scanned retrospectively. The age, gender and month of admission of all patients were recorded. Four categories of reasons for admission were analyzed: 1) screening for sports participation, 2) sports injury, 3) medical advice, 4) misdirection/misadmission. Results: A total of 4151 patient files were recruited to the study. The male gender and ages of ≤18 years were in majority among the overall patients by the rates of 57.74% and 42.16% respectively. The most common reason for admission was sports injury (50.37%), followed by screening for sports participation (35.87%), misdirection/misadmission (9.69%), and medical advice (4.07%). The highest rate of overall admissions was in September (13.41%). Conclusions: Pandemic has influenced the view of exercising and sport among society, increasing the popularity of Sports Medicine and the admissions to the outpatient clinics for various reasons. The surprising relatively high rate of misdirected/misadmitted patients appears as economic and work burden to healthcare system. Sports Medicine should be described to both society and physicians of other medical branches properly.