Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH, aka "The General" or "The County", officially the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital), serves as the public hospital and only Level I trauma center for the City and County of San Francisco. Located in the Mission neighborhood, over 80% of the patients seen here have publicly-funded insurance or are uninsured, allowing trainees to provide top quality, compassionate care to otherwise marginalized communities. This includes San Francisco’s large homeless and marginally housed population, diverse immigrant communities, patients struggling with the effects of drug and alcohol abuse, or with complications from advanced HIV/AIDS. SFGH was one of the epicenters of the original AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s. It continues to provide outstanding care for many of our city’s HIV-positive residents. Many patients have recently arrived from developing nations, and here residents encounter infectious neurological diseases or advancement of disease due to lack of care not typically seen in the industrialized world. In May 2015, the majority of ZSFG's clinical services were relocated to a new hospital. Claude Hemphill III, MD, MAS serves as Chief of Neurology and Director of Neurocritical Care at SFGH.
San Francisco General has a Ward Service, a Consult Service, and a Neurocritical Care (NCC) Service. Residents rotate one month on the Ward Service as an R2 and one to two as a senior (late R3 year and R4 year). Residents spend 1 month on the Consult Service as a senior resident (usually during the R3 year) and one month on the NCC service during the R3 year. The Ward Service ranges from 5-15 patients. The ward and NCC services provide extensive clinical experience in coma, stroke, head trauma, post-cardiac arrest cooling, intoxications, severe convulsive disorders, and complications of alcoholism and AIDS, as well as experience with ICP management and invasive multimodality monitoring. As a consequence of serving as the level 1 trauma center for the city of San Francisco, a significant proportion of patients have acute neurologic or neurosurgical problems.
There is a night float system that covers the services 7 days per week, 365 days per year.