A pregnant woman critically ill with swine flu was being treated in a Swedish hospital today because there were no beds in Leicester for specialised treatment.

The 26-year-old suffered a rare complication and was flown to Stockholm because no beds were available in Leicester's Glenfield Hospital for the procedure she needed.

The Scot was admitted to Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire, last week where she was put on a ventilator because of an extreme reaction to the H1N1 virus.

Earlier yesterday, a new website to diagnose people with swine flu crashed within minutes of launching after it was deluged with thousands of hits a second.

NHS Ayrshire and Arran's specialist intensive care team recommended that the pregnant Scot received a highly-specialised procedure known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).

This involves circulating the patient's blood outside the body and adding oxygen to it artificially.

ECMO is a relatively new technique that is used when a patient's lungs are functioning very poorly even with ventilation and high levels of oxygen.

The UK has a national ECMO unit in Leicester but all five beds there are being used.

However, a bed has been found in a similar unit in Stockholm and the patient was transferred under pan-European arrangements for sharing such scarce facilities.

A specialist medical team was sent from Stockholm and the patient was flown to Sweden, arriving at the hospital last night.

The health board said she had adult respiratory distress syndrome.

The Government said last night that a new website to diagnose people with swine flu was experiencing "unprecedented demand".

The system, which launched at 3pm yesterday, was receiving 2,600 hits per second – or 9.3 million hits per hour – at around 5pm.

The website crashed within minutes of launching but appeared to be running normally a short time later.