The Tower Health Urgent Care center at 15 Main Street in Hellertown is temporarily closed. According to a sign taped to the door of the facility, it is closed because the company is allocating its resources to other locations, due to COVID-19. Local residents are advised by Tower Health to drive to its Doylestown urgent care center if they need care urgently.
If you’re in need of urgent care, you may want to avoid a Hellertown emergi-center for the time being. Tower Health’s urgent care facility in the Shoppes at Hellertown on Main Street is currently closed.
A sign taped to the front door at Tower Health Urgent Care said the facility is temporarily closed and offers an apology for the inconvenience.
“To better serve our communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tower Health is reallocating much needed supplies and staffing to select locations,” it said.
A sign taped to the front door of Tower Health Urgent Care in Hellertown includes directions to the nearest open urgent care facility the company owns, which is in Doylestown, approximately 45 minutes away.
Saucon Source reached out to the company’s public relations department to request additional comment on Thursday.
As of late Friday, a response to our inquiry regarding the business had not been received.
The letter taped to the front door advises individuals who believe they are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms to call Tower Health’s COVID-19 screening line.
Individuals who aren’t experiencing COVID-19 symptoms are told to visit Tower Health’s urgent care center in Doylestown, which is about a 45-minute drive from Hellertown.
Calls to the urgent care center’s listed phone number could not be completed as dialed Thursday, and the facility is listed as being “temporarily closed” on both Google and on the Tower Health Urgent Care website.
In recent days, various publications have reported about financial woes Berks County-based Tower Health is currently experiencing.
Philadelphia Business Journal reported Tuesday that the company is considering selling some of the hospitals it owns as part of a “turnaround strategy,” and WFMZ-TV Channel 69 News reported Thursday that the company’s credit rating was downgraded last month after its Philadelphia-area hospitals lost close to $400 million over the past two years.
The Reading Eagle reported earlier this month that Standard and Poor’s lowered Tower Health’s bond rating to “junk” status.
Ordinarily, Tower Health’s Hellertown urgent care facility, which is located at 15 Main Street, is open daily from 9 a.m to 9 p.m., 365 days a year. In addition to urgent care, the facility provides services such as routine physicals to patients without an appointment.
Its closure–however temporary–has created another hole in the small shopping center, which currently has five vacancies. Three of them are long-term, and a fourth was created when a locally-owned dry cleaning business succumbed to the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic in August.
A freestanding former bank branch in the shopping center parking lot is also vacant, however it is slated to become a Starbucks in the near future.
