A Current Survey of Injuries Sustained by Professional UK Championship Rugby League Players

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Medicine - Surgery, Sports Medicine, grade: 2.0, University of Bath (School of Health), language: English, abstract: Research into the incidence of injury in rugby league is very limited with a wide variation in injury rates for the same game even over comparable time periods. This may be explained by differences in the methodology of these studies and the fact that virtually all UK rugby league injury surveillance studies have been conducted pre-2000, whereas studies from the southern hemisphere mostly tend to date from post-2000.

During the 2009 season, data was collected on all injuries incurred during competitive games and rugby training sessions, for a first team squad of a British Championship rugby league club. Data analysis was limited to injury incidence rates and relative sub-category frequencies for injury causation and acuity, contact versus non-contact, nature, location and severity with transient versus time-loss as well as the influence that rugby session type and main playing position may have on these.

This study was the first to trial rugby league injury data collection according to recently published IRB standards and revealed higher than usual overall and overuse training injury rates, a larger proportion of time-loss and contact injuries as well as different relative distribution of injury severities when compared to the existing literature. This may represent new injury trends in rugby league, which need to be further examined. Therefore a multi-team, multi-season rugby league injury surveillance study should be performed, ideally at Super League and Championship level.