Vienna, Austria: Injuries occurring to people who ride e-scooters cost Irish hospitals an average of €1,726 per patient, and researchers have calculated the total overall cost to one hospital in a single year was €128,650.
Dr Thomas Suttie, a senior house officer in emergency medicine at Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown, Abbotstown, Dublin, Ireland, told the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Monday): "In 2021 we published the number of patients who came to the emergency department of our suburban hospital as a result of e-scooter injuries, and recently we published an update that showed these figures had more than tripled in 2023. Today I am presenting the results of the follow-on project to delineate the financial costs of them. We believe this is the first study that quantifies these costs in Ireland." [1]
Dr Suttie and colleagues gathered data on the cost of emergency department attendances, admissions to acute care wards in their hospital, radiologic investigations, surgery and outpatient attendances for the 76 patients who presented at the hospital with injuries from e-scooter accidents in 2023.
E-scooter injuries were mainly musculoskeletal, often involving complex trauma that required major surgery.
"These often placed a burden on our orthopaedic colleagues, as these patients required orthopaedic follow-up with or without surgery or hospital admission. Thirteen patients required orthopaedic admission and 34 patients, including those who were admitted, required outpatient follow-up," said Dr Suttie. "The other type of injury was usually head injuries, which did not require medical intervention. There were no deaths among the patients with head injuries, nor were they admitted to the intensive care unit."
The researchers found that their suburban hospital spent €128,650 in 2023 on treating e-scooter injuries. In addition to the average cost per patient of €1,726, the total cost of emergency department attendances was €35,264; the total cost of following up these patients as outpatients was €17,380; and the total cost of hospital admission was €75,600.
"The costs were staggering," said Dr Suttie. "We knew there was a novel burden on our emergency department and orthopaedic team from e-scooter injuries, but it was interesting to discover how much they cost."
The researchers believe their findings can be extrapolated to other hospitals in Ireland and the costs could be even higher for some.
"As our hospital is a suburban one, it is not where the majority of e-scooter riding and injuries occur in Dublin. Dublin's city centre hospitals would see more and the cost of them is likely to be significantly higher than in our hospital.
"E-scooter injuries are associated with significant costs and place an additional challenge on an already stretched health care system. Further funding needs to be made available to treat them and alleviate the burden that has been placed on health care services.
"Changes to legislation and public health measures, such as making helmets compulsory or ensuring e-scooters comply with new and existing legislation and that these points continue to be enforced, could make a big impact on the number of injuries, the cost to users and to the health service," concluded Dr Suttie.
A second abstract presented at the congress as a poster [2] looked at the outcomes in Dublin of recent changes in the law for e-scooters in Ireland. From May 2024, e-scooters could be ridden on roads but the riders have to be over 16 and adhere to the 20 km an hour speed limit. The study found that injuries to those aged under 16 decreased, but the overall injury rate increased, helmet use dropped, and the involvement of alcohol or substance abuse increased among injured patients. Admissions to hospital also increased.
Dr Felix Lorang is a member of the EUSEM abstract selection committee. He is head of the emergency department at SRH Zentralklinikum Suhl, Thuringia, Germany, and was not involved with the research. He said: "E-scooter use has risen exponentially in recent years in several European countries, including Ireland. The study by Dr Suttie and colleagues reveals the large increased cost to one hospital of admitting and treating patients with injuries caused by riding e-scooters. Though only looking at costs, these data show that hospitals all over Europe will face a rising burden of patients with e-scooter-related injuries. This suggests that we need to take steps not only to make e-scooter use safer, but also to prepare for different kinds of injuries to those we are used to seeing."
