'The Ugly' has a facelift!

Starting out as the ‘AIDS Bus’, but more affectionately known as ‘The Ugly!’, the Kirketon Road Centre’s (KRC) outreach bus was established by The Albion Centre in the late 1980s and transferred to KRC’s management in 1990.

The bus was one of the first-of-its-kind in the world to provide vital health services, including free HIV testing, condoms and clean needles to the most hard-to-reach among KRC’s target populations. It provided care and support close to where and when people were at risk of acquiring HIV, sexually transmitted infections or viral hepatitis, late into the night.

Gary Gahan, Projects Manager, Kirketon Road said: “With the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, there was an urgent need to provide COVID care to vulnerable communities. In response, KRC rapidly expanded its bus outreach program to offer COVID-19 testing and vaccination, showing the versatility of this outreach mode of service provision.” 

With its origins as nightly outreach with a limited number of stops in the Darlinghurst area, the KRC outreach bus now has a presence in multiple community locations across the Inner City and the south-eastern suburbs of Sydney, ensuring that vulnerable communities have access to the same level of COVID-19 assessment, testing and vaccinations as the broader community. 

“All this extra activity has taken its toll, so our bus recently had a little facelift,” Mr Gahan said. “In addition to the wonderful new signage on the outside of the bus, we’ve had a little renovation inside, making the space more suitable for the provision of COVID vaccinations while retaining the multi-purpose clinical aspect.”

“The KRC bus has had quite a few makeovers across the years and is not at all ugly! But every day and night, it still heads out to deliver much-needed health for all!”