On January 17, 2009 concussion experts and professional athletes who had suffered from this injury gathered together at the London Hockey Concussion Summit. The public summit was followed the next day by a stakeholders’ meeting. Out of that meeting the Summary Statement of the Stakeholders Meeting was released and the results published in the popular press.
Another product of the stakeholders’ meeting, together with the 2008 Safe Hockey Summit, was the Hockey Neurotrauma and Concussion Initiative (HNCI), recently renamed the Sport Neurotrauma and Concussion Initiative (SNCI). The SNCI Research Committee was formed to function as an international, multi-sport committee comprising multi-disciplinary experts from North America, Europe and Australia. The first project of the SNCI Research Committee was the Hockey Concussion Education Project (HCEP).
The HCEP was a very successful physician-based approach of direct observation, diagnosis, documentation, and sequential treatment of concussion in junior-level hockey. It resulted in the November 2010 publication of a four-part series of articles that appeared in the medical journal Neurosurgical Focus:
The HCEP discovered that concussion incidence level was seven times greater than what had been previously recorded in the literature. The shocking results of this study were shared in a televised news conference and received significant public attention, with one-half billion readers of the findings in the first two days of publication.
The Sport Concussion Library is a legacy project of the HCEP. The library is a free, regularly updated, public- and researcher-accessible site that contains published peer reviewed information on the important topic of concussion in sport.