Millwall could be set to play a crucial role in improving crowd medical services at football matches.
The Championship club have teamed up with London’s South Bank University for a wide-ranging study into modernising medical services at football grounds.
Academics and medics reviewed 981 emergency care episodes at Millwall between 2002 and 2016, in a bid to help update provisions at UK football matches.
The report suggests football crowds can be managed effectively by smaller numbers of medical professionals.
“The new model of employing a smaller dedicated team, as we have done at Millwall FC, makes sense when you consider that the shift in demand on services in present-day spectator care rarely derives from major mass casualty situations,” London South Bank University professor Alison Leary said.
“In recent years, austerity measures in England have also placed resource constraints on healthcare service providers such as the statutory ambulance service and the acute sector. Managing demand at source has become a fundamental necessity.”
Millwall supporter Micky Simpson hailed the club’s match-day medical services.
“Millwall is often classed by some as the smallest club in the League financially but it undoubtedly has a Premier League-level medical team,” Simpson said.
“If a fan has a heart attack during a game, we have the advantage that with our professional medical team, we can diagnose whether they are actually having a heart attack or not, and decide quickly whether to send them straight to a cardiac ward and not just straight to A and E.”
