Blog: Back in the treatment room for Olympic athletes

Shropshire injury specialist Simon Roberts has swapped his day job at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital near Oswestry to work at the athletes’ polyclinic at London 2012.

He writes from the Olympic Village of his experiences rubbing shoulders with the world’s greatest athletes – and treating their aches and strains:

After some beach volleyball, athletics, Taekwondo, gymnastics & judo, I have been in the Olympic Village Polyclinic (athletes' health centre) itself today.

This is going be a health centre as legacy from the games & looks excellent. There's a great atmosphere & mix of different experts from different backgrounds. Very busy on a scorching hot Summer's day from 6.30am.

Some of the athletes are starting to go home now, and the National flags hanging outside their flats disappearing, but others are coming to us with either fresh or long-standing injuries needing sorting out.

We are only looking after athletes, but they also get unwell just like anyone else (& overtraining dramatically increases the risk of coughs & colds).

We've an excellent team of GPs who deal with this general work as well as contraception etc with specialists immediately available. I'm told that 300,000 condoms were donated for the use of he 15,000 athletes & there are some hangovers.

From the injury point of view, we have a little emergency area for broken bones etc, with immediate access not just to X-ray, but to ultrasound, CT & MRI.

We have two MRI scanners on site (the same number as in Oswestry) working 15 hours a day, but even with this, the waiting list for non-competing athletes is now up to two days.

It's interesting to treat athletes whose injuries sustained only hours before can be found on Youtube. It's not every day you can actually watch footage of the injury which occurred to the patient in front of you rather than relying on their memory of what happened.