A Swedish hospital has become so overcrowded that young patients have been given pans and spoons as a substitute for emergency buzzers, a union says.

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The Swedish Association for Health Professionals said the pans and spoons were issued in the children's ward at Ostra Hospital in Gothenburg to cheer them up, The Local reported. Hospital employees purchased bells at a hardware store for adult patients because there are not enough emergency buzzers for all.

All nine hospitals with emergency rooms in western Sweden are desperately overcrowded, a report by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare said. Maria Tenggren, a union official and employee at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, said the hospitals "long ago passed the limit of what is acceptable."

"We have for years nagged about the problem of overcrowding, but nothing happens," she said.