Health bosses are making some changes to the way hospital beds are allocated.
The Department of Health says that to ensure emergency admissions are managed effectively, and to provide safe care to patients, some surgical beds will be converted to medical beds.
This may mean reducing the elective non-urgent surgical admissions to hospital while continuing to ensure that urgent surgical care and planned cancer surgery continues to be provided.
The unprecedented decision by Noble’s Hospital management team has been taken to use beds on Ward 4, the gynaecological ward at Noble’s Hospital, to care for medical patients for the coming week.
The hospital will be directly contacting patients who may be affected by this decision.
A spokseman said: ‘The department is grateful to the public for their understanding during this extraordinarily busy period.’