Another important fact they state is that an athlete with two or more concussions within a year are at greater risk of further brain injury and that both adults and children should not be returning to play for 21 days after a concussion. The rest of their guidelines follow the same guidelines as the UK Government’s grassroots concussion guidelines apart from their guidance on page 8 for returning to play after multiple concussions “Any child, adolescent or adult player with a second concussion within 12 months, a history of multiple concussions, players with unusual presentations or prolonged recovery must be assessed and managed by health care professionals with experience in sports related concussions and no further participation in Rugby must take place until the player is cleared…”. They state that a player can return to play before the 21 days rule for concussions if they are successfully assessed by an ‘advanced level of concussion care’ which must include doctors with medical training and experience of concussions, access to brain imaging and be assessed by a team of various experts in the field of neurology and concussion (World rugby,2024),. All these guidelines seem sensible and good advice but do these guidelines go far enough to protect rugby players? The HIA is a process to evaluate if a rugby player has sustained a concussion during elite matches. The 1st part of the assessment is when a player is taken off the field for 10 minutes to assess them, they have their balance and memory tested and they check for typical signs of concussion, if the player fails then they are permanently removed from the match. Straight away this is a major issue when all the science says concussions can take 24, 48 hours or even days or weeks to display any symptom especially when we look at the 2022 six nations England v Wales match when Tomas Francis was cleared to play even when he was clearly staggering around the pitch, a tell-tale sign he was suffering from a concussion. If a player is showing obvious signs of a concussion whilst playing, then they should be removed from the game for the rest of the game according to World Rugby. Any player who undergoes a HIA will then need to medical evaluation within 3 hours to check progression of the suspected concussion and then reassessed in the following 36-48 hours. So, if a player passes the 1st HIA they are allowed to carry on playing but as they may not show obvious symptoms in that very quick 10 minutes this can cause a serious and dangerous scenario, the science shows they are already at a higher risk of sustaining yet another concussion and all the scientific data shows sustaining multiple concussions, especially in quick succession is not only dangerous it can be fatal. Another concerning rule with elite rugby  is that they can return to matches after 7 days and players that are classed as higher risk can return to play after 12 days (world Rugby,2022), this not only goes against all the science and various guidelines it is literally putting elite rugby players short term and long term brain health at risk, especially when you take into account all of the sub-concussive hits a rugby player sustains during training and playing matches. In conclusion the World Rugby and RFU have guidelines that are in some ways in line with the NHS (NHS, 2022) and government’s grassroots guidelines but those guidelines go out of the window when it comes to elite players, the human brain can not distinguish between a grassroots player and an elite player, a concussion is serious no mater what level of sport that brain is playing at and the guidelines should be the same for everyone. An argument could be made that elite players are at more risk of sustaining much more severe concussions due to the fact professional rugby players are faster and can be much more muscular than grassroots players, they play more matches per season and are involved in full contact training throughout the week so therefore are more than likely experiencing much greater forces to their brains and more frequently.