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In the spring of 2019, I moved to Paris for a study abroad experience and discovered Lime e-scooters. The world’s first shared scooter system had been around for a little over a year and likely inspired the surge in micromobility solutions—shared and private—that we see today. I loved using them to zoom around the French capital. My host family, less so. And given how much money e-scooter injuries are costing an Irish hospital that isn’t even in a city, their instincts may have been right.
On Monday, researchers at the European Emergency Medicine Congress revealed that e-scooter injuries cost Irish hospitals an average of $2,024 USD (€1,726) per patient. For one hospital in particular, the total overall cost in one year added up to $150,867 USD (€128,650). While for American standards that might not seem like an exorbitant amount of money, the point is that more people are getting hurt and showing up at hospitals with complex injuries.
“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,” Thomas Suttie, a senior house officer in emergency medicine at Dublin’s Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown, told the congess, as reported by a European Society for Emergency Medicine statement.
In 2023, 76 patients with e-scooter injuries arrived at the hospital, mainly with musculoskeletal injuries, which frequently featured complex trauma that needed major surgery. Suttie and his colleagues collected information on the cost of their ER visits, acute care ward admissions, radiology services, surgery, and outpatient visits.
“These often placed a burden on our orthopedic colleagues, as these patients required orthopedic follow-up with or without surgery or hospital admission. Thirteen patients required orthopedic admission and 34 patients, including those who were admitted, required outpatient follow-up,” Suttie explained. “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.”
However, Suttie told Gizmodo that while the 2023 group used for this financial analysis didn’t include any severe head injuries requiring intensive care, these types of cases are becoming more common. He noted that helmet use among e-scooter riders remains limited—only about 8% of patients in a related study were wearing protective headgear—and that many of the head injuries in the cost analysis were concussions that could be treated and discharged directly from the emergency department.
That year, Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown spent $150,867 USD (€128,650) on e-scooter injuries. In addition to the average cost of $2,024 (€1,726) per patient, the total cost of emergency department visits was $41,356 (€35,264), the total cost for outpatients was $20,382 (€17,380), and the total cost of hospital admission was $88,660 (€75,600). According to the researchers, these results can be extrapolated to other Irish hospitals.
However, 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 center hospitals would see more and the cost of them is likely to be significantly higher than in our hospital,” Suttie said.
Smarter public health policies and updated legislation—such as mandatory helmet laws and stricter enforcement of e-scooter regulations—could significantly reduce injuries, lower costs for riders, and ease the burden on healthcare systems, he added.
Because Ireland’s public hospitals absorb medical costs directly, these injuries are further burdening an already overstretched healthcare system. Hospitals in the U.S., however, bill patients or insurance companies directly, meaning the nation’s rapid increase in e-scooter and e-bike injuries is probably leading to significant out-of-pocket costs for patients and higher premiums for insurers.
In fact, according to a study published earlier this year on e-scooter injuries in Denver, Colorado, the highest hospital charges for these types of injuries reached nearly $23,000. Even the lower end of the spectrum was exorbitant, with a median cost of $4,871 for e-scooter injuries that occurred during the day.
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Source: Gizmodo