Calgary physician urges e-scooter and e-bike safety as summer trauma surges

Summer is bringing a surge of trauma injuries to Alberta hospitals, with a growing number resulting from accidents involving e-scooters and motorized bikes, according to Dr. Haley Cochrane, an emergency physician at the Peter Lougheed Centre.

"Unfortunately what we're seeing is that head, face and neck injuries that come with the force of being thrown from these devices at higher speed," Cochrane said Thursday. "It has been changing over the years, the popularity of a lot of these devices, the recreational use of these scooters which we didn't see five or 10 years ago."

Between June 1 and August 31 last year, there were 33,000 emergency department visits in Alberta's larger centres involving six of the most common injuries. Arm, wrist and hand injuries were most frequent, followed by leg, ankle and foot injuries, then cuts and lacerations, head injuries, major trauma from vehicle collisions or cycling crashes, and allergic reactions.

A common thread among scooter users is the absence of helmets. "When you're picking up these devices that are commercially available, they are not often provided with helmets," Cochrane said. "There have been a few companies that do provide them but no one really wants to wear them."

The seasonal uptick coincides with emergency departments struggling under long wait times caused by beds downstream being occupied by patients who should be cared for in other settings. Volumes across the province are rising as more people move to Alberta, and staffing challenges related to burnout are compounding the strain. Emergency rooms are only going to worsen in the fall, warned Dr. Paul Parks, a Medicine Hat emergency physician and past president of the Alberta Medical Association, who noted that Calgary emergency departments are marginally better than Edmonton's but still under significant pressure.