Empowering women to overcome trauma.

The Women's HIV Program at UCSF (WHP) provides comprehensive care that is interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive, and designed with evidence to allow clients to realize their inherent health and power. We create a warm and supportive community that fosters sisterhood among our clients and a loving relationship between staff and patients. We perform world-class research that defines the most effective model of care for women and girls with and at-risk for HIV. WHP also provides local, national, and international leadership for an effective response to the increasing epidemic of HIV in women as well as the larger and related epidemic of violence against women.

The WHP core team is committed, compassionate, and competent. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and social workers collaborate as genuine partners to create the best care plan for each patient. Our extended team includes the world-class medical resources of UCSF and multiple long-standing community partners who are integrated into our care team and greatly expand our capacity for healing.

WHP has provided sensitive, effective healthcare to women and girls living with HIV for 20 years. In that time, our experiences and research have shown that the key to making patients strong again is not only to treat their medical needs, but also to effectively address trauma – which is incredibly common among our patients and has a dramatic impact on their health and lives. To us, HIV is a symptom of a far larger problem – violence against women and girls. Our model of trauma-informed care helps women heal from and prevent trauma as a core part of their primary medical care.

The UCSF Women's HIV Program in collaboration with Positive Women's Network-USA recently released a publication describing an innovative new model of primary care delivery that focuses on addressing recent and past trauma. The article is titled, "From Treatment to Healing: The Promise of Trauma-informed Primary Care."

This new model is the culmination of five years of work performing pilot studies and convening a national strategy group of trauma experts, policy-makers and advocates from the government, military, academia and community organizations. The model is designed to guide implementation and evaluation studies across the country, including in our clinic here at UCSF.