Injury Prevention
As a consultant knee surgeon, I spend a significant part of my working life reconstructing anterior cruciate ligaments and repairing serious knee injuries that, with the right knowledge and the right programmes in place, should never have happened. That is a difficult thing to sit with. And it is why ACL injury prevention in children and young athletes has become one of the most important and urgent parts of my professional life.
A Growing Problem: The Rise of ACL Injuries in Young Athletes
Over the last decade I have noticed a striking and deeply concerning increase in serious sports injuries around the knee in children and teenagers across the UK. The most alarming trend is the rise in ruptured anterior cruciate ligaments in young athletes, an injury that was once considered rare in skeletally immature patients but is now one of the most common reasons a child is referred to my clinic.
An ACL rupture is a devastating injury at any age. For a child or teenager it means a minimum of twelve months away from sport, months of intensive rehabilitation, significant psychological impact, and a substantially elevated risk of early knee arthritis in adulthood. It derails young people at exactly the moment sport is doing them the most good: building fitness, friendships, discipline and confidence. The human cost is enormous, and the burden on the NHS from paediatric and adolescent ACL injuries is second only to concussion as the most pressing sports injury issue we face in the UK today.
Girls are at particular risk. Female athletes are between two and eight times more likely to suffer an ACL rupture than their male counterparts playing the same sport, a disparity that is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves.
The Evidence is Clear: ACL Injuries in Children Are Largely Preventable
The frustrating truth is that a large proportion of ACL injuries in young people are preventable. Research from Scandinavia, Australia and the United States consistently shows that structured youth injury prevention programmes, when properly implemented, can reduce the number of serious knee injuries in children's sport by around 50%. That is a staggering figure. Half of these life-altering injuries do not need to happen.
Individual sports bodies do have their own programmes, such as FIFA 11+ for football and Activate for rugby. But for a variety of reasons, uptake across UK schools, grassroots clubs and academies remains low, and awareness is patchy at best. Compared to Norway, Sweden, Australia and the United States, the UK is genuinely behind where it needs to be in recognising, funding and embedding these programmes into everyday sport.
Power Up to Play: A UK Charity for Sports Injury Prevention
I am a trustee of Power Up to Play, a UK sports injury prevention charity working to change this picture. The charity is dedicated to improving awareness and understanding of evidence-based injury prevention practices across British sport, from grassroots clubs and school PE departments right through to national governing bodies. It is work I believe in deeply, and I give it as much time as my clinical commitments allow.
If you are a coach, teacher, parent, sports body or journalist looking for expert guidance on youth ACL injury prevention in the UK, Power Up to Play is an excellent starting point.
Find out more at www.poweruptoplay.org
Learning from the World's Best: Oslo and the Skadefri Programme
In pursuit of better solutions for UK children, I applied for and was awarded a BSCOS Consultant Bursary which enabled me to travel to Oslo to visit Professor Lars Engebretsen and his team at Skadefri, the Norwegian national injury prevention programme widely regarded as leading the world in this field. Norway has been doing this properly for years. Seeing their system in practice, the infrastructure, the buy-in from coaches and schools, the cultural normalisation of prehabilitation as simply part of sport, was both inspiring and sobering. It reinforced my conviction that what Norway has achieved is entirely replicable in the UK. We just need the will, the funding and the coordination to close the gap.
Conferences, Speaking and International Expertise
I am regularly invited to speak on the subject of ACL injury prevention in children and young athletes at national and international medical conferences. Forums I have spoken at include the Warwick Sports Knee Conference at St. George's Park and Edgbaston, the British Orthopaedic Association Congress in Aberdeen and Liverpool, the Kids Knee Conference in Sheffield, ISAKOS in Munich, and most recently the BOSSTA Conference in Manchester.
In September 2025 I have been invited to present at the 7th Transalpine Congress on Sports Injuries in Switzerland, one of Europe's leading forums for sports medicine and orthopaedic surgery. That this conversation is now happening at an international level feels like an important and overdue step forward.
Media: Comment, Interviews and Expert Opinion on ACL Injuries
I am an experienced media commentator on the subject of ACL injuries in children, youth sports injury prevention and knee health in young athletes, and I am always happy to speak with journalists, broadcasters and podcast producers working in this space.
In June 2023 I appeared on Sky Sports alongside fellow Power Up to Play trustees to discuss the rise in ACL injuries in young athletes and what can be done to address it. I have also spoken on the BSCOS Research Podcast, the Royal Society of Medicine T&O Podcast, and the BBC Sports Desk Podcast with Katie Smith.
If you are a journalist or media producer seeking expert comment on ACL injuries, children's sports injuries or youth injury prevention in the UK, please get in touch via the contact page.
Ongoing Partnerships
Beyond the clinical and conference work, I am actively developing relationships with organisations that have the reach to make a real difference at grassroots level: Oxfordshire and Berkshire FA, the Manchester United Foundation, and Football Association Wales. Each partnership represents an opportunity to embed evidence-based ACL and sports injury prevention into the everyday sporting lives of thousands of young people across the UK.
This is a long game. But the evidence is on our side, the will is there, and the cost of doing nothing, measured in torn ligaments, lost seasons, damaged joints and diminished young lives, is too high to accept.
