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SINGAPORE – Foreign dormitory workers are receiving help to monitor their health through telemedicine and a device that monitors oxygen levels.
About 8,000 pulse oximeters have been distributed so far and another 12,000 will be delivered, Human Resources Minister Josephine Teo said Sunday (May 10).
The devices monitor a person’s oxygen level and can help detect early signs of deteriorating health.
Monitoring is considered the next step in containing the coronavirus outbreak, which has predominantly affected foreign workers.
“Now that we stabilize the situation and strengthen medical support, we now have to plan the next phase,” said Ms. Teo.
This involves helping workers recover fully and facilitating their eventual return to work.
“A very important aspect of this recovery phase will be how to strengthen health monitoring and health surveillance in our dorms in particular,” said Ms Teo, who spoke during a visit to JTC Space @ Tuas, where Find a parking lot that has been converted into a medical post for foreign workers. It will be operational from Monday.
A medical post has doctors and other staff on call to meet the health care needs of foreign workers who have symptoms of acute respiratory infection, such as fever and cough.
“We are introducing new measures that will help us … to do health surveillance … in a more comprehensive way,” said Ms. Teo.
“We hope that by doing so, we can help the individual worker prevent a recurrence if they have already been infected, or for those who have not, to prevent them from getting sick in the first place.”
The monitoring process includes teleconsultation services available to dormitory workers through their mobile phones. They can complete an online form and a doctor will call them by video in two hours.
Around 400 such inquiries have been made since April 25.
The doctors are from the nine private health care providers that are under the regulatory sandbox of the Ministry of Health.
Teleconsultation services will be available even when on-site medical facilities or external public health preparedness clinics are closed for the day.
Ms. Teo toured the Tuas medical post, which has a swab isolation facility where foreign test workers are kept isolated before receiving their results.
The facility has a capacity for 150 workers, where there are 120 places for those who expect results.
The JTC Space @ Tuas medical post center is the fifth of its kind. The others are in Woodlands, Kranji, Tuas South, and Kaki Bukit.
They can cater to some 75,000 foreign workers in dormitories converted to factories and other temporary accommodation on site.
The JTC Space @ Tuas, Kranji and Tuas South facilities also have swab isolation capabilities.
The 43 specially designed bedrooms have their own medical facilities on-site to meet the needs of 200,000 workers.
There are also eight tele-kiosks installed in the dorms with more to come to ensure 24-hour access to a doctor, the Human Resources Ministry said.
The kiosks facilitate video consultations with doctors and are connected to devices that can monitor vital signs such as blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and temperature.
The Ministry of Health announced 876 new cases of Covid-19 in Singapore on Sunday.
The vast majority of these continue to be work permit holders living in dormitories.
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