A new mobile swab station has been rolled out, aimed at making it faster and safer for healthcare workers doing Covid-19 swab tests at foreign worker dormitories.

The mobile swab station (MSS) integrates a booth system developed by Singapore General Hospital, called SG Safe, into a Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) cross country ambulance.

Workers can be swabbed outside the ambulance. The uncontaminated environment in the ambulance means the person doing the swabbing does not need to wear full protective gear, such as a hairnet, gown and goggles.

To perform the test, the swabber puts his hands into a pair of gloves affixed to a glass panel to take samples from a worker's nose.

The joint project by the Singapore Army, Defence Science and Technology Agency and ST Engineering will help in the testing of all 323,000 foreign workers in dorms. So far, more than 32,000 of them - or about 10 per cent - have been tested.

The MSS was deployed on Monday to do swabbing operations at places outside of purpose-built dorms.

More might be deployed, depending on the needs of the inter-agency task force handling the Covid-19 outbreak among foreign workers.

Military Expert 7 Low Koon Huat, 53, who co-leads a task force that provides technical support to other task forces, told reporters in a virtual interview yesterday that previously, the swabbing booths had to be moved from site to site, and the MSS makes this process more efficient by reducing the logistics involved.

Compared with having to carry and unload the SG Safe booth system to set it up on site from a vehicle, which takes about 30 minutes, getting the MSS ready takes half that time.

Captain (Dr) Ivan Low, 26, from the SAF Medical Corps, said his team feels much safer operating from within a clean environment.

"This is made possible by the ventilation filtration system, which essentially transforms the cabin into a giant N95 mask. Furthermore, the cabin is pressurised to reduce the risk of droplets, aerosols entering the compartment."

Each MSS can be set up by three people, namely, the transport operator, the person conducting the swab, and another to collect the swab sample after it is completed. Other than the swabber, the other two people do not need to be medically trained.

Two more MSS prototypes - involving a multi-utility vehicle with one swab station and a 20-foot container with three - are expected to be ready by the end of next month.