E-bike injuries are a massive burden, say Royal London Hospital surgeons

We’re in the morning meeting on the orthopaedics trauma ward on the 10th floor at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.

Like every morning, the team are here to talk through the cases that will face them in the day ahead, and a familiar theme pops up.

From one side of the room a surgeon talks about his patient: “A 32-year-old, fit and well student… a couple of days ago he fell off an e-bike sustaining a closed left tibial plateau fracture.”

And a few moments later a voice next to us describes another case: “Six-year-old girl, she was hit by an electric bike, she has a closed tib/fib fracture.”

The little girl they are talking about is Frida.

She was out playing with friends in the park at the weekend when she was hit by someone on an electric bike.

It fell on her, breaking her tibia and fibula – bones in her lower leg.

She was rushed to the Royal London, where surgeons operated – inserting pins that will help the bones heal.

But that healing process will take around a year.

Her dad Ed sits beside her hospital bed, watching her sleep.

He said they had been preparing to head to Millfields Park on Saturday to join friends for a picnic. Frida had already gone ahead with them.

Then the phone rang to say there had been an accident.

“It seems like he was going probably going too fast to stop in time. It smashed into her,” Ed says.

“They are so heavy these things, he came off it on to her, the bike landed on top of her.”

“It just seems crazy that they can be allowed to ride through public parks like that,” says Ed.

“I understand how it can make sense for pedestrians and push bikes to share those paths, but for children to be sharing a path like that with an electric bike – they are so big and heavy – the damage they can do is really significant.”

Ed said the cyclist “had no paperwork”, and was in the UK working on a tourist visa, and didn’t have a UK address or phone number.

He makes the point that if the e-bikes were classified as motorised, the cyclist would not have been able to ride it.

“It’s just not OK that these accidents are happening, they seem to be happening more and more,” he says.

Ed explained that his family and friends were now going to fight for more regulation around e-bikes, and said they had already written to the mayor and local MP.

“We are determined to see some changes made,” he says.

Frida is one of 150 such cases to come through this Royal London unit in the past six months.

Surgeon Jaison Patel is seeing more and more cases like this.

“It’s a massive burden on our department and I’m sure it’s the same across the whole of London,” he tells us.

“If we can reduce the number of patients coming in with these sorts of injuries it would be great for the patients obviously, but also takes massive pressure off us in the NHS.”

Jaison deals with lower limb injuries. Just along the corridor his colleague Nick Aresti does the upper limbs.

Nick explains that he is a cyclist himself, and it’s something he encourages people to do for the benefit of their health.

But, he has real concerns about e-bikes, and says: “What we’ve noticed with e-bikes is that the speed in which people are coming off is much higher and as a result, the injuries are much worse.”

He shows us X-rays of someone who has broken their collarbone.

He explains that with e-bikes, the injuries they’re seeing are much more severe, and as such, people are “struggling to get back to normality”.

Nick and Jaison both agree it’s something they’re seeing increasingly more of as time goes by, and they think the industry needs better regulation.

“We should do something about it, I don’t think we can let this carry on,” Jaison says.

Over recent days of course, thousands of Londoners have taken to e-bikes to help beat the strikes. For many it has been an essential way to get about.

London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner Will Norman says better regulation of the rentable electric bikes could be on the way.

“We need to ensure that the vehicles are safe, that there’s parking, they’re not scattered all over the place, and that the batteries are safe,” he says.

“I’m really delighted that the government has now indicated in its English Devolution Bill that London and other cities across the UK will be getting more powers so again we can start regulating that, to ensure that they’re safe for people to use and operate while they get around”.

The bill is currently going through parliament, and as yet there is no date for when it will be passed.

But Duncan Dollimore, head of campaigns at Cycling UK, who are members of the Electric Bike Alliance, said he would recommend against the regulation of e-bike usage.

“The cost of inactivity-related health issues to the NHS each year is £7.4bn, and people cycling saves them £1bn.

“We have seen a slight rise in the number of incidents involving hired e-bikes in London, but the health benefits of people cycling outweigh the risks by around 20 to one.”