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Emergency room doctors at Cork University Hospital (CUH) have called for mandatory safety training for farmers.
Safe Pass-style training should be introduced in order to reduce the number of life-changing and fatal accidents that happen on farms, doctors Michael Sheehan and Conor Deasy have said.
The pair work in CUH’s emergency department, where 54 patients were admitted following animal-related farm accidents between 2009 and 2013.
One of the 54, a farmer in his 80s who was kicked by a cow, later died. Another of the patients was a two-year-old child, whose lower leg was broken after being attacked by a cow.
The majority (85%) of those injured were male and the median age was 56.
Leg breaks were the most common injuries sustained, with 13 leg breaks among the 54 patients.
Other injuries included hip fractures, blunt chest trauma, head injuries, arm breaks, spinal fractures, pelvis fractures, facial injuries and lacerations.
Nine of the patients required treatment in CUH’s intensive care unit, with four sustaining head injuries.
Over one-third of the farmers who suffered major trauma were over 65 years of age. This echoes Health and Safety Authority (HSA) figures, which show that more than half of the people killed on farms in 2017 were aged 65 or over.
The study found that most serious farm-related injuries occurred in July, when the breeding season was underway and bulls were with the herd.
Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, the CUH doctors highlighted that these 54 injuries were only the tip of the iceberg, with large numbers of less serious injuries being treated in hospital, but not recorded as farm accidents.
“These are only the very major injuries, the patients who need treatment for weeks on end after they leave the emergency department, who cannot go back to work and those who are left with permanent disability,” said Michael Sheehan.
“The 54 injuries in this report are all life-changing or life-threatening.”
Emergency room doctors treat farm accidents involving large animals as equivalent to road traffic accidents.
“Animal-related accidents on farms and car accidents are both viewed as high energy traumas,” explained Sheehan.
“Those patients go straight to the resuscitation room, they need to have CT scans early and orthopaedic surgeons are called in immediately – we know that these farm accidents can result in very serious injuries,” he said.
Both doctors have farming connections. Sheehan is the son of a dairy farmer and Deasy grew up on farm.
Both are adamant that compulsory safety training, similar to the Safe Pass system in place in the construction sector, should be introduced for farmers to reduce the incidence of injuries and fatalities.
They also recommend that more effort should be made to separate house and place of work on family farms, and highlight that the aging profile of farmers means that they have longer recovery times from injuries than younger farmers.
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