Ambulatory care for patients with HIV/AIDS: creating a specialty clinic.

This paper describes the development of a primary care HIV/AIDS clinic at a large university teaching hospital. A multidisciplinary team of health professionals provides direct care and education to an HIV/AIDS population that has increased from 36 patients in 1986 to 500 in 1990. Collaborative planning and decision making by physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators has been key to the institution's ability to support the needs of such a rapidly expanding population. This paper presents a description of the planning and implementation process used to develop an HIV/AIDS specialty clinic at this institution.