A toddler has sustained multiple fractures after falling from the second floor of a hotel in Blackpool.

Emergency services were called to the Rooms Inn hotel, in the town centre, shortly before 9am on Tuesday to reports of a baby having fallen from a window.

Lancashire police said the 18-month-old girl had been airlifted to Alder Hey children’s hospital in Merseyside. The force said the toddler was in a serious condition and inquiries were under way. No arrests have been made.

Witnesses told the Blackpool Gazette the girl was feared to have sustained a fractured skull and chest injuries.

The owner of the Rooms Inn hotel said the injured girl was part of a family of four who were staying at the 32-room venue.

Several police vehicles, including a crime scene investigation van, were parked outside the hotel shortly after the incident.

Wendy and Kevin Twiss, who run a neighbouring hotel, raised the alarm after hearing the girl fall into a yard at the back of the building and looked out to see her in distress.

Kevin Twiss told the BBC: “We just said to everyone: ‘We need to get downstairs. We need to go and help this little girl.’ I looked up and saw who I believed were the parents looking out of the window.”

Twiss said he climbed over the wall and picked the injured girl up before a man he believed to be the girl’s father kicked the gate open and took hold of her.

Kerry Wormald, a housekeeper at the nearby Arabella hotel on Albert Road, told the Blackpool Gazette: “A young man came running down to say that there was somebody in the back alley screaming that they needed an ambulance.

“We looked out the back window into the car park and couldn’t see anything, so I went into the back alley to have a look and as I went out I could hear a baby screaming.

“It sounded like something was coming from next door, so I shouted over. At that point I saw [a man] in the second floor window on the phone. I went out the front. We could hear the sirens on the ambulance and I stood on the street with a few other people flagging it down. The baby was on the full body stretcher in a neck brace and she had a mask over her face.”

A spokeswoman for the North West ambulance service said it sent an ambulance, an air ambulance and two rapid response vehicles to the hotel after being called at 8.46am.