Summary: Be prepared to answer questions about whether there are any guns in the home, and how your relationship is with your spouse. Also hope that any of their arbitrarily applied office policies don't bite you. Read on for further info about that:
Very bad experience. We have 4 kids and live an hour and a half away, yet they insisted on only allowing us to schedule our kids one per day. This is a huge burden, especially for someone who actually has a job and can't take a half-day every day for a week. But, because of all the good reviews and an inability to find a closer doctor for our kids in rural Alaska where we live, we decided to just make the sacrifice and go.
So I told my boss I would need five hours off at the beginning of the day for several days in a row, and scheduled the earliest appointments they had. On the first day, I got my son there. One of the first things they handed me was a paper that asked VERY intrusive questions, such as whether I had guns in my house, whether they were kept in a safe, how my relationship with my wife was, etc. Maybe I'm just an overly private individual, but these questions felt very invasive and made me very uncomfortable. Not because the answers are bad (my guns are in a safe and my relationship with my wife is excellent, thank you), but because it felt like they were giving me a rectal exam and looking for reasons why I shouldn't be allowed to keep my kids. Once we finally saw the doctor, it was great and consistent with all these 5 star reviews that you see.
Despite that unpleasant experience from the day before, on day two we woke up and began the 1.3 hour journey from home to Eagle River. Getting 4 kids ready to go and out the door is not a fun experience, especially when they are ages 1, 3, 4, and 6. This time however, we ran into a big accident on Parks highway that brought traffic to "stop and go" for well over 30 minutes. As time kept ticking by, my wife called LaTouche Pediatrics from the car to tell them that we were stuck in traffic but were on our way. They told us that as long as we were within 15 minutes, it would be no problem. Not knowing when the traffic would start moving, we crossed our fingers and prayed. Finally we got there about 12 minutes after our originally scheduled appointment.
There was a line at the check-in window, which, according to the clock on their wall, delayed us an additional three minutes. By the time I got through the line, we were exactly 15 minutes based on the clock on their wall. However that was apparently TOO late for them. The man working the window went to ask the provider if we could still be seen, and came back with the terrible news that no, we were not going to be seen now because we were late. I explained to him our situation with the very long drive and taking time off work, and he went back and explained to the provider the situation. When he returned it was with the bad news that no, we would not be seen. Nobody there seemed to care one bit about our situation. Our time investment to get there means NOTHING if it delays them by 15 minutes.
After that, we decided we were never going back. We'd rather take our kids to "Joe's Crab Shack and Kid Doctor Place" than there. We were super blessed tho because one of our friends told us about Frontier Family Medicine in Wasilla. We went there and they were amazing. It's a lot closer to our house than Eagle River also. It's not in-network with our health insurance provider (which is why we went to LaTouche in the first place), but well worth paying the out-of-network costs to have somebody who genuinely cares about you and your kids as human beings.
The problem with this world now is the total lack of empathy and understanding for other human beings. LaTouche could not have cared any less for us or our situation. I'd like to think that if we were bleeding out in their parking lot, they'd as least drive around us instead of running us over on their way to lunch (Ok that's way over-dramatic, but I'm fired up right now reliving this experience).
Anyway, if you've read this far into the review, do yourself a favor and find somewhere else to take your kids. If you like the location, we've seen two family doctors at the Primary Care Associates clinic on the first floor of this same building and had a great experience. read more