A hospital in the UK has been forced to declare a major incident after the number of critically-ill coronavirus patients rose dramatically.
The Royal Stoke University Hospital made the decision after 38 Covid patients on ventilators, prompting the alert level to be raised.
According to Stoke-on-Trent Live, Hospital management has just seven ventilators left with 322 coronavirus patients currently in beds at the beleaguered site.
It's being reported that the hospital's bosses have reached an agreement with NHS trusts in Birmingham and Coventry and Warwickshire to transfer some of their critically-ill patients to hospitals in the West Midlands in a bid to try to lessen the strain.
This arrangement remains in place until midday on Tuesday and will be reviewed daily.
Royal Stoke chief executive Tracy Bullock has apologised to patients and families caught up in the chaos.
She said: "We have been experiencing significant pressure across all areas of both hospitals, and particularly within the critical care service at the Royal Stoke.
“We have put in place a range of measures to ensure NHS resources are directed where they are needed during the Covid-19 pandemic and to make sure that both hospitals, staff and patients remain safe and care is prioritised to protect staff, patients and our services.
“The decision to transfer patients out of our hospital is not something we take lightly and we would like to apologise to our patients and families who are affected by this. Given the reduction in the community infection rate of Covid-19 across Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent we are hoping this position will be resolved quickly.
“We would encourage all our communities to keep up the good progress we have made to reduce the infection rate and remember hands, face, space.”
The news comes as Scotland recorded 44 more coronavirus related fatalities overnight, with 788 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in the past 24 hours.
In a bid to continue to raise testing capacity, the UK government has opened a new walk-through coronavirus testing centre has also opened in a car park in Cumbernauld.
The centre is designed to be easily accessible for people without a car and is part of a UK-wide drive to continue to improve the accessibility of coronavirus testing for local communities.
