San Francisco VA Health Care System

San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center

The San Francisco VA Health Care System (SFVAHCS) serves as a major tertiary health care referral center for veterans throughout Northern California. Besides state-of-the-art primary and specialty acute care, the SFVAHCS also provides outpatient care and long-term, home based care. It has numerous outstanding clinical programs as well as five of the 65 VA National Centers of Excellence.

The SFVAHCS is a major teaching hospital of the UCSF School of Medicine. All staff physicians are jointly recruited by SFVAHCS and UCSF School of Medicine. The SFVAHCS has more than 120 residency and fellowship positions covering all specialties except obstetrics, pediatrics and family medicine, and provides about one-third of all medical student clinical training.

The SFVAHCS is renowned for its research and development (R&D) program, the largest VA R&D program nationally. There are over 200 principal investigators and career scientists working at the medical center, including four in the Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

The Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (P&LM) at the SFVAHCS provide comprehensive diagnostic services for the main hospital and its community-based outpatient clinics, and serve as one of the major training sites for UCSF P&LM Residency Program. The primary areas of service include surgical pathology, cytopathology, autopsy pathology, clinical chemistry and toxicology, hematology and hematopathology, blood bank, microbiology and point-of-care testing. Faculty members in the departments are actively engaged in various basic scientific, translational and/or clinical research.

SFVAHCS is located on a bluff at the Northwest corner of San Francisco. The hospital facilities overlook the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands and the Pacific Ocean with unsurpassed scenic beauty.

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