Epidemiology of occupational injuries among insured workers in Saudi Arabia between 2004 and 2016

Abstract

This is a retrospective analysis of annual reports on occupational injuries issued by the national social insurance agency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for the years 2004 through 2016. For each criterion we calculated an index based on the equation NY/Nref x100, where NY is the number of occupational injuries by a specific criterion in a specific year Y, and Nref is the number of injuries in the corresponding criterion in the reference year, i.e. 2004. We also calculated the number of injuries to number of workers ratio (Ni/Nw ) for different occupations and economic sectors to get a clearer idea of the injury trends per worker. In terms of occupational injury rates (with respect to 2004), we observed increases in construction, financing & real estate (economic sectors), among engineers and technicians (occupations), in infections and secondary contusions (injury type), for upper and lower limbs (affected body parts), over falls and “other” causes. Most injuries occurred on Fridays, which is a weekend day in Saudi Arabia. We also observed increased recovery without disability (injury status). However, if we look at the number of occupational injuries per worker, we can see a decreasing trend over time for all occupations and economic sectors, most likely thanks to improved labour law and safety at work practices for insured workers. Our findings are similar to reports from other Persian Gulf countries and reflect current labour health and safety issues in the area.

Occupational Injuries in the Emergency Department: Single Center Study

“…Most of the injuries occurred on Sunday (the first day of the week in Bahrain) during the morning to afternoon hours. This is contrast with a study done in Saudi Arabia [17] which shares common cultural features and also has Sunday as the first working day of the week, where they found that most OIs occurred on Friday, which is a weekend. A study done in Turkey did find results similar to our study where the injuries occurred mostly during weekdays [25].…”

“…The average length of stay for admitted patient was 8 days; other studies have also reported similar length of stay [10,19,26]. We found that manufacturing sector was the most commonly involved place of injury and this is in line with other studies [14,15,22] while other studies in GCC countries have reported construction sector as the most common place of OI [10,16,17]. The high number in manufacturing sector may be due to the fact that more people are employed in this sector in Bahrain.…”

“…Future studies need to examine the appropriate triage for OI especially in the ED [1]. Consistent with previous studies where the upper extremity was the most commonly injured part, we also found the same to be true in this study [12][13][14][15][16][17]21]. Unlike most studies where soft tissue injury or wound and laceration was most common type of injury [13,14,20,21] we found fracture/dislocation to be the most common type of injury and similar results were reported in studies done in Egypt [22] and India [23,24].…”

“…The injuries were more prevalent in a younger age group and this trend is observed in most studies and has not changed much [1,10,[12][13][14][15]. More than 50% of the patients were non-Bahraini, which was in line with other GCC states where the work force employed consists mainly of immigrant workers and hence a higher number in the work-related injuries group [10,[15][16][17][18][19]. Most of the injuries occurred at a public street as road traffic accidents where the workers were injured while going to work or returning from the work site (factory/plant).…”

“…Most of the injuries occurred at a public street as road traffic accidents where the workers were injured while going to work or returning from the work site (factory/plant). This is in contrast with most studies where the place of occurrence was mostly factory or construction site [13][14][15]17]. A study done in Brazil did find public streets as one of the most common places of occurrence of work-related injuries in line with our findings [20].…”