A woman almost gave birth on the floor of a Gold Coast hospital storeroom, in an incident administrators concede may happen again because of a critical bed shortage.The woman, known only as Erica, spent three hours lying on a makeshift bed on the floor of a linen storage room last Friday, after being told the Gold Coast Hospital had no available maternity beds.Although the woman was transferred to a birthing suite shortly before giving birth to son Jackson, Gold Coast Health chief executive Adrian Nowitzke yesterday admitted the hospital had reached breaking point."We normally deliver between eight and 10 babies a day and on that Friday, we delivered 17, which is a lot of babies," he told AAP."This case is sending us a message that we're getting very close to full and although this is the first time it's happened, we're not going to put our head in the sand and pretend it's not going to happen again if we don't continue to make changes."With only eight delivery rooms and two alternative birth centre rooms, Dr Nowitzke said the incident had prompted him to seek partnerships with nearby health facilities and hospitals to help ease the burden.He blamed the Gold Coast's booming population and the federal government's baby bonus for lifting the local birth rate by 24 per cent over the past six years.This financial year, births at the hospital are expected to exceed 3300, up from 3134 deliveries in the previous year, despite the hospital's capacity to deal with only 2,400.Queensland Health Minister Stephen Robertson conveyed his apologies to Erica and her partner, Mitch."I deeply regret ... how that couple were treated, it is not acceptable under any circumstances, nevertheless it did occur," he said.Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said he feared the hospital could one day fall victim to the chronic lack of maternity beds, noting the case of Jana Horska, who miscarried in a toilet at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital."The tragic incident at North Shore could end up happening here because of a lack of planning," he said."(The Queensland government) say they're planning for the future but they haven't planned for the present." AAP