Injuries from sports and recreational activities are extremely common in kids. It puts stress on the kids, their caregivers, and our healthcare system when they occur. Many of these injuries are preventable with the right care and knowledge on safety measures. We created Active & Safe Central: a website that provides injury prevention information and other resources to kids, parents, and coaches for 51 different sport and recreational activities. We wanted to evaluate how we were doing in communicating complex research to website users, and how helpful our tools are in terms of injury prevention education.

Our development of the site was blended with research throughout. First, we put together a project team that included experts, injury researchers, parents, coaches, and athletes. We then used this group to determine which sports/activities our site should include, and performed an evidence review of relevant research in the area. After this, our research centred around the site deepened through the use of focus groups. We combined our project team with end users of the site to form these focus groups, who helped us develop and change the site.

Our first round of focus groups took place at the beginning of site development. Participants gathered for 60 mins to talk about their experiences with online injury prevention tools, and offered feedback on our initial site. We asked them open-ended questions about their first impressions, how useful they thought it was, how easy accessing data was, and more.

Our second focus group met for 60 mins as well, but during the mid-development stage of our site. They interacted with a drafted version of the site, and let us know how useful, accessible, and functional they thought it was.

From this, we worked to translate research findings on injury prevention into an accessible, easy to use site informed by information from our focus group sessions.

Users of our site have access to a central platform for information on sport/activity-related injury prevention, informed by research that is often hard to access otherwise. Using focus groups and multiple checkpoints in development was a useful tool, making our site tailored to its users: parents, coaches, and athletes who want to learn about specific injury risks with their sports, and how to prevent or manage those risks.