The theory of event medicine: a literature review.

Background: Event medicine is a field of medicine that encompasses the provision of healthcare to spectators/attendees at sports stadiums, music events, and festivals. This article explores existing theory to understand the evidence base currently afforded to operational practice. Aim: The study aim is to explore the current literature on event medicine to identify collective themes and areas for future research, prompt clinician reflective practice, and inform future standards of professional practice. Methods: A six-stage thematic-analysis-based literature review was conducted. The electronic databases of Google Scholar, Medline and PubMed were searched between January and April 2024. The search terms used were 'event medicine', 'mass gathering medicine', stadium medicine', and crowd medicine'. Articles prior to January 2004 were excluded. The search included English language full-text articles. Findings: A total of 32 articles were selected. They originated from Europe, Northern America, Southern Africa, and Asia, across a variety of sporting, outdoor festival, and music events. From their analysis, five main themes were identified: patient presentations; medical resource skill mix; predictive modelling; transfer to hospital rates; and acute cardiac events. Conclusion: Event medicine operational practice is under-researched, and essentially affords a large theory-practice gap in event medical service planning, provision, and application. Event-medicine clinicians should aim to deliver prehospital medical care that reflects the complexity of the five identified themes, as well as critically analyse existing event medical data, challenge their conceptual roles, and seek to develop future improved core standards of event medicine with a view to developing safer models of care for event spectators/attendees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]