Background In Japan, the ministry has emphasized that safety management is important for PE instructions.

Objective The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationship between the injuries in elementary PE and the stages of teacher professional development.

Design The method of this study is to collect the number of injuries in elementary PE in each professional development stage by the record of Japanese school health room. These collected data are classified into three types of injuries: Open wound, Closed wound, Other wound. The survey was conducted in 2014.

Setting Elementary school of physical education.

Patients (or Participants) The subjects were nine Japanese elementary schools that received research cooperation. The number of participants was 54 teachers (20 novice teachers, 15 experienced teachers, 19 expert teachers).

Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) The independent variables were the three stages of teacher professional development.

Results 1) When focusing on the total number of injuries, there were no significant differences among three professional development stages (p<.05). 2) When focusing on the total number of injuries, there were no significant differences between male novice teachers, female novice teachers, male experienced teachers, female experienced teachers, male expert teachers and female expert teachers (p<.05). When focusing on the proportion of three types of injuries, there were significant differences among three professional development stages (p<.05). Closed wound were more common in the experienced teacher stage and less common in the expert teacher stage. On the other hand, Open wound was more common in the Expert teacher stage and less common with Novice teachers and Experienced teachers.

Conclusions In particular, it is suggested that the quality of injury changes from serious injuries to minor injuries between Experienced teachers and Expert teachers. That is, it implicates that professional development of safety management in PE is different between Experienced teacher and Expert teacher.