Pursuing Partnerships
UCSF is working toward the day when a person afflicted with serious mental illness has the same expectation of care that a
cancer patient has.
By Katherine Conrad
Matthew State, MD, PhD, chair of UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry, believes the path to achieving that goal is in partnerships with government, business, and nonprofit organizations.
Key Partners
State calls Zuckerberg San Francisco General “the beating heart of public psychiatry” within UCSF. Operated by the City of San Francisco, ZSFG is staffed by UCSF faculty physicians and psychologists. The safety-net hospital has 44 acute psychiatric beds and San Francisco’s only 24/7 dedicated psychiatric emergency department.
The centerpiece of a system of community care, developed in partnership with the City of San Francisco Department of Public Health, includes Citywide Case Management, a division of UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry, which provides psychiatric services and vocational training to individuals with persistent mental illness; the Alliance Health Project, which offers services and support for the LGBTQ and HIV communities; the Trauma Recovery Center; and Division of Substance Abuse and Addiction Medicine.
UCSF is also developing a collaboration with Tipping Point Community, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting poverty in the Bay Area. Tipping Point seeks to reduce the city’s chronic homeless population by half by 2022, through providing housing and working with the public and private sectors to tackle the many causes of homelessness.
The San Francisco Healing Center opened this spring, with 54 beds for mentally ill patients deemed unable to care for themselves. This public-private partnership includes the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Dignity Health, UCSF Health, and Crestwood Behavioral Health.
