E-scooter safety warning

Every shift is busy for Dr Gary Mitchell at one of Brisbane’s biggest emergency departments.

Years ago, he could have never imagined he would be seeing so many patients as a result of electric scooter crashes.

E-scooter usage has taken off quicker than the scooters themselves and research shows a staggering number of riders are ending up in hospital with a vast range of injuries.

“Last week we had a patient come in with multiple rib fractures and organ injuries in their abdomen and we’ve had some cases where patients have died as well,” Dr Mitchell, Emergency Medicine Physician at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital (RBWH), said.

“At RBWH we have an average of one and a half to two presentations per day, so anywhere from 40 to 60 presentations over a month.

“These people with significant injuries end up in a tertiary trauma centre, so it has a huge impact.”

A combined donation of $200,000 from RACQ and RBWH Foundation will fund research into e-scooter injuries, which will influence policies and laws for improving user safety.

The funding will support three research projects over a three-year collaboration between Jamieson Trauma Institute (JTI), a leader in injury research, and major emergency departments, including RBWH.

“If we could use this research to even halve the presentations to our emergency department that would be a huge benefit for our bed block at the moment,” Dr Mitchell said.

“We’ve already gathered data from over 950 e-scooter presentations, but this donation will allow us to continue this research and do more in-depth work with specialists within the hospital from the orthopaedics and neurosurgical teams.

“For example, we’ve already found about 30% of those presentations have alcohol on board but that’s really an underestimate as 63% of cases didn’t mention whether they’ve had alcohol or not, but we need people on the floor to collect that data.

“Even with that significant presentation of 30% with alcohol on board, we have found some significant findings.

 “They are three times more likely to be admitted to short stay or hospital if they used alcohol compared to not using alcohol and they are more likely to have a more severe injury.”

RACQ research into e-scooter behaviour revealed an alarming number of riders were not taking safety seriously.

RACQ’s survey found almost half of e-scooter riders admitted to dangerous riding behaviour and more than 10% did not use safety equipment.

Many users also admitted to riding under the influence of alcohol, not knowing the road rules and crashing.

RACQ Road Safety and Technical Manager Joel Tucker said the survey also found a quarter of e-scooter owners modified them to go faster.

“We know that the majority of people who use e-scooters jump on them for a bit of fun, but they can be incredibly dangerous and with the uptake increasing across the state, it’s time people took safety into consideration,” Mr Tucker said.

“We were shocked to learn that 27% of e-scooter users surveyed admitted to riding under the influence of alcohol and only 29% of people knew exactly where it’s legal to ride an e-scooter.”