2026 • 8(2) • DOI: 10.30542/JCEMS.2026.08.02.05
Poster Presentation Abstract
Collegiate-based emergency medical service (CBEMS) providers frequently encounter medical complaints shaped by campus athletic events, social gatherings, and student activities. Many CBEMS agencies operate in a standby capacity with limited on-scene resources, making accurate anticipation of event-based clinical demand essential. While prior studies of mass gatherings have identified associations between CBEMS utilization, patient acuity, and factors such as event size, alcohol presence, and temperature, much less is known about epidemiological patterns and transport disposition at smaller-scale campus events, including intramural athletics and social gatherings.
In this retrospective observational study, we evaluated whether injury type and ambulance transport likelihood vary by campus event type, and whether environmental and temporal factors predict injury rates at intramural athletic games. Among 150 standby CBEMS encounters, events included club/varsity athletics (n = 48), intramurals (n = 42), parties (n = 40), and other campus events (n = 20), with clinical presentations varying markedly by event type. Overall, extremity injuries were the most common (43.3%), followed by alcohol intoxication (22.0%), head injury (12.7%), and bleeding (11.3%). Transport likelihood differed significantly by event type, with the highest ambulance transfer rate at parties (70.0%) compared with other events (25.0%) and athletics (7.8%) (Fisher’s exact test, p < 0.001), and by mechanism, with alcohol intoxication associated with the highest transport rate (81.8%).
Among intramural athletic events, injury rates did not differ significantly by precipitation or twilight conditions but varied by hour of event start time (likelihood ratio test, p = 0.025), with the highest rate observed during the latest games (10 PM).
These findings demonstrate meaningful heterogeneity in patient presentation and transport outcomes across campus event types, with temporal variation in intramural injury rates, suggesting opportunities for event-specific operational planning and targeted clinical training. Generalizability may be limited by the single-agency, retrospective study design.
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Author and Article Information
Address for Correspondence: Tyler Nilson | Email: tylernilson8@gmail.com
Conflicts of Interest/Funding Sources: By the JCEMS Submission Declaration Form, all authors are required to disclose all potential conflicts of interest and funding sources. The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest. The authors declared that they did not receive funding to conduct the program or research associated with this work.
Ethical Compliance: The authors attest that the research associated with this abstract was conducted in accordance with the JCEMS Ethics Guidelines.
Submission History: Received January 16, 2026; accepted for presentation and publication January 27, 2026.
Poster Presentation: This abstract was presented as a poster at the Academic Poster Session of the 34th Annual Conference of the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation; February 20-22, 2026; Arlington, VA, USA. The authors received the First Place Award in the Poster Presentation Competition for Program Development & Evaluation.
Published Online: February 19, 2026
Published in Print: September 01, 2026 (Volume 8: Issue 2)
Reviewer Information: In accordance with JCEMS editorial policy, poster presentation abstracts undergo double-blind peer-review by at least two reviewers (JCEMS Editorial Board members and/or independent reviewers) prior to acceptance for presentation and publication. JCEMS thanks the anonymous reviewers who contributed to the review of this work.
Copyright: © 2026 Nilson, Kumar, Li, O’Donnell, & Yacoub. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The full license is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Electronic Link: https://doi.org/10.30542/JCEMS.2026.08.02.05
