On January 1, 1983, Ward 86 opened on the sixth floor of Building 80 at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) as the world’s first dedicated outpatient AIDS clinic. Dr. Paul Volberding, an emeritus professor of medicine at UCSF, had seen his first HIV-positive patient with Kaposi’s sarcoma—a rare cancer later linked to AIDS—on his first day at SFGH. Along with doctors Constance Wofsy and Donald Abrams, he established a compassionate, patient-centered care model during the early, difficult days when San Francisco was the epicenter of the HIV epidemic in the United States. This approach later became known as the San Francisco Model of Care, which served as a blueprint for global treatment standards.

The Ward hosted numerous clinical trials, including those that contributed to the development of early treatments like AZT and the later combination therapies that proved highly effective in halting and even reversing the effects of AIDS, as well as preventing its transmission. In 2019, the POP-UP program was launched to provide…