Durham Reporter

Hospitals are still struggling to get back to pre-pandemic levels of service, but that’s little consolation for a mother who took her daughter to the emergency department at Duke Regional Hospital and had to wait 10 hours to be seen.

Ung said her 22-year-old daughter was having severe pain and bleeding due to an earlier tonsillectomy.

"I felt very just vulnerable, having my child and (having) all this pain, and I can't do anything about it,” Kelley Ung told ABC 11 News. “And here I am a nurse, and I just felt so like I was letting her down.” 

A big part of the problem, a hospital nurse said, is that staffing levels still aren’t where they need to be.

"Throughout the pandemic, it's been a little bit of a struggle, to say the least, trying to staff all of our emergency departments across the state at optimal levels,” David McDonald, an emergency department nurse who is the president-elect of the NC Emergency Nurses Association, told ABC 11 News. 

In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a high number of patients led to increased waiting times. Now, it’s staffing shortages, McDonald said.

"We're having a harder time staffing emergency departments, a harder time staffing inpatient beds, which is causing that backlog,” he said, according to ABC 11 News.

The latest federal data from Medicare.gov indicates that the average patient in North Carolina spends around 3.6 hours in an emergency department, which is about 18 minutes more than the latest reported national average. Both Duke Regional and University Hospital and UNC's Rex location are experiencing wait times higher than the state average. 

"It's frustrating for us being in the hospital environment because we want to get people in, and we want to be able (to help them),” Meka Douthit, the president of the NC Nurses Association, told ABC 11 News. “However, the patients that are presenting are sicker than they've ever been.”

Ung just longs for the day when things get back to normal.

“I was very overwhelmed. I was very frustrated,” she told ABC 11 News. “I wouldn't want anyone to go through what we went through, ever, because it was traumatic.”