Strategies to Reduce Work-Related Injuries in the Saudi Manufacturing Sector

Work-related injuries remain a material operational, social, and policy concern in Saudi Arabia as the Kingdom expands advanced manufacturing under Vision 2030. Manufacturing combines high-energy machinery, manual material handling, shift work, chemical exposure, maintenance tasks, contractor interfaces, and a diverse workforce, making injury prevention a multi-causal governance problem rather than a narrow compliance issue. This review paper synthesizes recent literature published between 2020 and 2026, together with current Saudi policy and statistical sources, to identify actionable strategies for reducing work-related injuries in the Saudi manufacturing sector. The review adopts a structured narrative approach modeled on public-health and occupational-safety review formats, emphasizing burden identification, risk-factor synthesis, intervention mapping, and framework development. The synthesis shows that the Saudi context is shaped by five interacting conditions: rapid industrial expansion, uneven occupational safety maturity across firms, the concentration of injuries among male and migrant workers, persistent exposure to struck-by, caught-in, fall, and ergonomic hazards, and growing heat risk in outdoor-adjacent and non-climate-controlled work environments. Evidence further indicates that isolated training or PPE campaigns are insufficient when not supported by safer design, supervision quality, inspection capacity, near-miss learning, and reliable leading indicators. In response, the paper proposes a Saudi Manufacturing Injury Reduction Framework that integrates hierarchy-of-controls thinking, ISO 45001-oriented management systems, multilingual competency assurance, ergonomics, heat governance, contractor control, digital monitoring, and integrated surveillance. The review argues that the most effective strategy is not a single intervention but a coordinated system that aligns engineering controls, worker participation, regulatory enforcement, and production governance. The paper concludes that injury reduction should be treated as a productivity and resilience agenda, not only a legal or humanitarian obligation, and that Saudi manufacturing can improve injury outcomes substantially by moving from reactive incident response to data-driven prevention. The novelty of this review lies in its manufacturing-specific focus within Saudi Arabia, its integration of regulatory, operational, ergonomic, and digital safety dimensions, and its proposed Saudi Manufacturing Injury Reduction Framework tailored to local industrial conditions including migrant labor, Gulf heat, contractor interfaces, and industrial-city expansion. This study makes a novel contribution by integrating occupational safety, process safety, and sector-specific risks (feed, glucose, and poultry industries) into a unified framework tailored to Saudi Arabia’s industrial transformation context.