INTENSIVE care at a south Cumbrian hospital is ‘full’ according to an MP, as University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) continues to cope with ‘significant pressures’ on its services.

On January 3 the trust declared it was in a critical incident, although this was stepped down this week.

However, the trust is still experiencing ‘significant pressures’ and remains at its ‘highest level of internal escalation’.

Among measures to alleviate the critical situation the trust opened additional beds at Westmorland General Hospital and relocated 20 patients who were deemed as medically fit to be discharged- freeing up 20 beds at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary for patients with a ‘greater clinical need’.

But, Tim Farron MP said that in a daily update he received from UHMBT it reported there are no available beds at Furness General Hospital’s intensive care unit.

He added that there are people within the trust’s care that are well enough to be discharged but cannot be because a care package cannot be created.

“In the hospital trust’s daily update on their situation it said there are currently no available beds in intensive care in Furness General Hospital,” said Mr Farron.

“They’re full.

“There are at least seven patients in Morecambe Bay who are in hospital who shouldn’t be because they can’t get a care package for them.”

In a bid to free beds families have been urged to help get their loved ones home from hospital quicker in a plea from NHS bosses in Lancashire and south Cumbria, who said a spike in Omicron cases was resulting in heightened hospital admissions.

Andy Curran, A&E clinician and executive medical director for Lancashire and South Cumbria Health and Care Partnership, said: “Delays in the process of discharging people from hospital have a massive impact on the capacity available to provide care to those patients who urgently need it and mean we can’t run our hospitals as efficiently as we need to.

“As we are now directly seeing the impact of the Omicron variant, we really need support from our community to help make sure that only those people who really need to be in hospital are.

“If we can get some of our relatives to come and pick up our patients thirty minutes, an hour, or four hours earlier - it potentially means we can get a patient off the back of an ambulance, thirty minutes to four hours earlier than we would do.

“The quicker we can get someone home, the quicker we can give the bed to another person who really needs it."