Health and Readiness of Tactical Populations

Dear Colleagues,

Tactical populations include first responders (firefighters, law enforcement officers, EMS personnel, etc.) and military personnel that have committed to protect life and property. Many of these occupations require the performance of arduous physical tasks in austere environments. As such, musculoskeletal injuries, psychological (e.g., PTSD) and physical morbidities (e.g., cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity), and decreased physical fitness occur across the career span. We are pleased to invite you to provide researchers, administrators, and practitioners with empirical research to elucidate these occupational threats, identify risk factors and mechanisms associated with their occurrence, and provide evidence-based practices to address them in tactical populations.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research aims and study designs on tactical populations may include (but not limited to) the following:

• Elucidate and evaluate critical mental and physical health, injury, and performance issues confronting tactical populations;
• Quantitative and qualitative investigations to identify risk factors and mechanisms of injuries;
• Longitudinal assessments of interventions to enhance health, injury, fitness and occupational performance outcomes to develop evidence-based practices;
• Cross-sectional designs to evaluate the role of physical fitness and occupational readiness in health and injury outcomes;
• Validation research to develop relevant assessments of occupational physical ability and technologies to support operator readiness in recruit and incumbent populations and to guide return to duty post-injury;
• Evaluate the impact of allostatic load (physical and psychological stressors) on occupational readiness, health, and injury outcomes.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Mark Abel
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• firefighter
• first responder
• health
• injury
• law enforcement
• military
• operator
• safety
• tactical