Welcome to the patient pathway video to the athletic groin pain program at the UPMC Sports Surgery Clinic in Dublin. This video will give you an idea of the process involved and the various steps you will encounter on the day itself. On arrival, you will attend the sports medicine reception. Our receptionist will run through the program of the day, including your individualized timeline. And we’ll ask you to carry out a number of patient questionnaires on the iPad. These questionnaires allow us to complete the data capture and add to our research program, enabling your treatment to become more effective and more individualised to yourself.
Following this, you will be directed to our MRI scanning department, where if you are yet to have a magnetic resonance image, we will ask you to carry out a number of safety questions followed by the scan itself. The scan usually takes around 25 minutes. This will give your clinicians detailed information about your underlying pathology. We may not have received if you have a scan. Please bring it with you. Otherwise, you’ll be given a desk at the completion of the procedure and then directed to our three-dimensional imaging laboratory, which is run on the fourth floor of the sports surgery clinic.
At the 3-D laboratory, you will meet our biomechanics team. Here you will be carrying out a series of progressive neuromuscular challenges and will require shorts and either indoor boots or trainers. Following the necessary consent forms, we will take some of your answers, parametric measurements, your height and your weight. And this will allow us to then place anatomical markers on a number of bony landmarks across your body, which allows our 10 camera system, vikon laboratory to capture your every movement.
We will run through the tests required with you before making the system live and capturing your data. The series of progressive tests puts your groin, hips, knees, ankles and torso under a progressive challenge following the capture, we will run through how these tests compare to our normative database and some of the underlying features which are contributing to your athletic groin pain. In particular, we are able to program a rehabilitation based exclusively off these tests. You will then meet your sports physician who will run through your imaging, your 3-D biomechanical capture, and then carry out a physical examination.
All our physicians carry out the same examination in order to ensure we make an accurate diagnosis. A member of our physiotherapy team will then carry out additional tests in order to individualize your rehabilitation process more closely. This has allowed the excellent results we have achieved so far in return to sport. The rehabilitation program is broadly divided into three levels. Level one focuses on pelvic control and you will be judged at which stage within this program you are out. We use exclusively dart fish TV and iPad driven data capture so that you can have video rehabilitation exercise given to you to take home on the day we upload these exercises immediately so that your biomechanical clips, rehab program and a paper record are given to you immediately.
Level two and level three of the program make use of our high-performance gymnasium and you will need to return to these. Finally, during the day, you may need a corticosteroid injection under fluoroscopy guidance. This will be carried out on completion of the program in order for it to take effect after your rehabilitation process has started. The aim of this is that we have a one-stop-shop delivering the first level of our world-class groin rehabilitation program to you on one day.
You will, of course, require at least two further attendances with a rehabilitation team focusing on our level to high speed running program and level three Change of direction program in order to complete the rehabilitation process. Despite the significant reduction in pain symptoms he may have following an injection. We hope this video has given you a greater insight into what to expect on your visit to SSC Groin Clinic.
Our research program into Athletic Groin pain started in 2012 in collaboration with Insight and Science Foundation Ireland.
Studies have produced a new MRI reporting protocol, discovered the emergence of three distinct 3-dimensional movement clusters, and also we have reduced rehabilitation time down to under 9 weeks. Our research has significantly reduced operation rates for both Hip and Groin surgery. The program is ongoing, collecting data on strength and power, and newer more field-based rehabilitation.
We have coined the term Biomechanical overload to describe the systems-based approach rather than focus on tissue tolerance and failure. Collaborations with researchers in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia continue to extend the reach of the research impact and currently have 2 publications in the top 10 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Our trials are registered at clinicaltrials.gov.
