Injury Patterns in Women’s Rugby

Injuries are an unfortunate but ever-present possibility faced by athletes, with potentially wide-ranging consequences impacting health, performance, finances, and organisational systems (Reusser et al., 2024; Williams et al., 2016). Understanding injury patterns then becomes a central knowledge point because of the ability of this information to feed into prevention, management and return to play practices following injury.  

Most of what is currently understood about the injury profile in elite women’s rugby has come from a select number of injury surveillance studies undertaken in senior international level 15-a-side competitions, such as the Women’s Rugby World Cup, and 7-a-side competitions like the HSBC SVNS Series. The recent expansion in the number of international women’s competitions, such as WXV Global Series and Pacific Four Series, and advances in domestic competition structures, like Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR) in England, have helped to swell the volume of available data that can help with shaping knowledge of the injury profile of women’s rugby. 

When comparing injury outcomes from different studies or settings, it is important that injury data have been collected using consistent definitions to enable findings to be compared on a like-for-like basis. Studies have typically applied a definition of a reportable injury as that which incurs a subsequent time-loss from planned match play or training activities of greater than 24 hours. References to injury data made in this module will refer only to injuries which have incurred a subsequent time-loss of greater than 24 hours.