More questions than answers for patients of Arrowhead Pediatrics who have been showing up to their appointments all week to find out they are closed.
A sign on the door posted since Monday claims electrical issues have caused the doors to close and that they would call to reschedule appointments.
Kara Paschal brought her daughter to the Glendale location after she came down with a fever Sunday night and all week she’s been trying to figure out what is going on.
“Couldn’t get in Monday, tried again Tuesday, couldn’t get in Tuesday, went by on Wednesday. The office had a note on the door something about electrical issues,” she said.
She even called the medical board and claims they told her a different story.
“I was given the information that the office had not paid its rent so the doctor was locked out of its medical records,” she said.
ABC15 reached out the Arizona Medical Board.
The board said they only handle cases against individual doctors and couldn’t investigate an entire facility and referred us to the Department of Health Services.
DHS told us that Arrowhead Pediatrics was not a licensed entity with their department, meaning it is privately owned and operated and referred us back to the medical board because they would be the ones to investigate.
The medical board never returned our calls following the first conversation.
Arrowhead Pediatrics website states they have two locations: one in Glendale and the other in Sun City West.
We checked out the location in Sun City West only to learn it had been closed for nearly two years. A man we spoke to said his son use to be a patient there and that they had closed because the owner could not pay the rent.
“Arrowhead has a lot of us patients with nowhere else to go but Urgent Cares and emergency rooms,” she said. “It’s insane that the pediatrician's office has left us with no one.”
ABC15 also tried calling the numbers for the office but no one picked up or the line went dead.
Names and phone numbers to doctors and the owners all lead back to the location in Glendale near 79th Avenue and Union Hills.
ABC15 did speak to a couple who showed up and walked into the building. They told our crews they did not know what was going on or why the owner had closed. Despite refusing to answer our questions, they did give us the name of the owners who we attempted to reach out to.
This afternoon our crews spoke to several patients who arrived to learn that the office was closed. Many had appointments scheduled for today like Debra Tellez and her 14-year-old daughter.
“I’ve been calling all day to verify the time,” she said. “I kept getting the run around on the voicemail, it said press zero and we can’t forward your call."
Others told us they had their suspicions something was going on when doctors began leaving and they’re upset that they never even got an email about what’s going on.
“Yes it freaks you out because you don’t know what to do or who you're supposed to call if she’s sick,” Tellez said.
Right now all patients are getting is nothing but confusion as they struggle to find where to take their sick kids and how they’ll get their medical records back.
“Why is nobody telling us anything? Why are we not receiving letters as parents,” said Paschal. “If this is just a small issue and they're supposed to be back up why is the website gone?…Whoever is over the office paying the rent has left us no choice but to find a new pediatrician.”
