Rugby injuries top sports claims list

Press, 1 July 1983, Page 5

Rugby injuries top sports claims list

Rugby injuries account for about 35 per cent of all sports claims to the Accident Compensation Corporation, its managing director, Mr J. L. Fahey, told an international sports medicine conference in Christchurch yesterday. The New Zealand Federation of Sports Medicine conference on rugby injuries was told that in the three years from 1980 the corporation paid $10.5 million in claims because of rugby union injuries.

During the same period, soccer was a distant second with claims costing $2.5 million, followed by rugby league, trail-biking, and skiing, he said.

Although rugby was still the leading sport in New Zealand, it now competed against other sports for its players. The high rate of injury reduced the attraction of the game. The mothers and wives of young men worried, and jobs could be lost.

There was also greater awareness of the cost to the

community in human and financial terms, and the public would not tolerate complacency where unnecessary injuries were occurring.

Mr Fahey said he believed that rugby union had an injury problem. Although there were more players of rugby than of other sports, it was pertinent to remember that it was a seasonal game, when compared with year-round sports such as squash, martial arts, or trail-bike riding.

Given that there were more than 200,000 active rugby players, the 5500 claims paid out each year meant that about one player in 40 suffered serious injury. “For every compensated claim the corporation believes that there could be 10 or more injuries that require medical treatment, but are not sufficiently serious to get on its books,” he said.

“It has been argued that it is unfair to compare rugby with other sports

which, by their nature, are inherently less bruising. I suggest that it is precisely because it is so bruising that rugby must do all it can to minimise injury,” he said.

Progress had been made in rugby safety in the last five years. Mouthguard wear had increased from 10 per cent before 1978 to more than 60 per cent, according to a recent survey by Mr Robin O’Neill, of the Manawatu Rugby Union, and the New Zealand Rugby Union had taken the initiative to counter the occurrence of severe neck injuries which were averaging about nine a year until 1980.

“I believe there were only three serious spinal injuries last season, and two in 1981,” Mr Fahey said. "It disturbs me, however, to find that this year the figures of previous years may be well surpassed — there is a need for constant vigilance and further hard work to consolidate gains made.”