Transforming and Redefining Health and Healthcare Education

The Refreshed Institutional Plan to 2023 provides a sustainable plan for success and growth of Southern California University of Health Sciences. The success of SCU depends upon the ability to anticipate and adapt to future trends in both environments. SCU graduates students and provides programs and services with an eye toward where higher education and healthcare are heading. SCU continues to adapt and change out of a desire for excellence and a need to respond to a changing environment.

View SCU’s Refreshed Institutional Plan to 2023 (PDF)

Mission

Our mission is to educate students as competent, caring, and successful integrative healthcare practitioners and professionals. The University is committed to providing an academic community imbued with kindness, integrity, humor, and determination.

Vision

To transform and redefine health and healthcare education.

Values

SCU’s four values are described below, as well as sample aspirational statements reflective of how these values might look in action. SCU strives to live our four values of Integrative Health, Evidence-Based Practice, Health Equity, and Inclusivity.

• Integrative Health: We teach, learn, collaborate, and lead by creating an open environment for multiple disciplines and professionals to bring their shared and unique skills together for the benefit of patients and students.
  • We utilize teams and teamwork to make a positive health impact with those we serve.
  • We seek, share, and rely on each other’s ideas and perspectives to improve our decision-making and outcomes, capitalizing on the strengths of each for the benefit of all.
  • We openly, skillfully, and productively address tensions between our professions and departments in the pursuit of transforming health and healthcare education.
  • We develop our pool of resources to inform our approach and leverage our unique perspective as an integrative health university, affecting our education, patient care, service, and work.
  • We address individual and community health by incorporating the whole person and weighing all factors that can impact health and wholeness.
• Evidence-based Practice: We value a culture of inquiry, assessment, research, scholarship, and judicious use of current best evidence to inform our decisions and work.
  • We seek, contribute to, and share from the most current and validated sources of evidence.
  • We continuously review our efforts and adjust to improve the quality of our outcomes.
  • Our teaching, learning, clinical, research, strategic, and operational work is informed by evidence as well as intuition, values, and experience.
• Health Equity¹: We value people’s health equally. We want all individuals and communities to have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy.
  • We educate and prepare students and stakeholders to understand and be empowered to impact determinants of health and reduce health disparities.
  • We consider health outcomes in our decisions and actions, paying particular attention to underserved and vulnerable populations.
  • We seek partnerships to expand our awareness, compassion, influence, and ability to close health gaps.
• Inclusivity: We welcome and celebrate the breadth of human diversity including, but not limited to, age, race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, spiritual and religious belief, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, and geographic background. Inclusivity broadens perspective in our reasoning and leads to better representativeness in our conclusions, more ingenuity in our problem solving, and greater equity in our care.
  • We cultivate a safe and thriving environment where everyone can learn, work, serve, and seek care.
  • We nurture discourse, eliminate obstacles, and ensure accessibility in our positive engagement with the world.
  • We strive to leave every person feeling valued and trusted.
  • We educate about and directly address implicit and explicit bias to cultivate empathy and understanding.
  • We communicate skillfully in our relationships to enable us to reach, serve, and connect with each other and the communities in which we live and work, on which we rely, and which we serve.

1“Health equity means reducing and ultimately eliminating disparities in health and its determinants that adversely affect excluded or marginalized groups”

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement

Southern California University of Health Sciences (SCU) is committed to maintaining a community of students and employees that reflect, embrace and value the breadth of diversity including, but not limited to, age, race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, spiritual and religious belief, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, and geographic background, consistent with our core value of inclusivity.

SCU’s Vision is to transform and redefine health and healthcare education. Our mission is in part, to educate students as competent, interprofessional and evidence-based trained, caring, culturally proficient healthcare professionals dedicated to integrative and whole-person care. As reflected by the SCU value of Health Equity, we value people’s health equally and want all individuals and communities to have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy. Therefore, we empower our students to impact determinants of health and reduce health disparities.

Our focus on inclusivity and cultural proficiency supports the need to attract and retain diverse students and employees. This focus also cultivates medical practitioners equipped to serve a complex, evolving and diverse populous, including those most vulnerable.

We work collectively to identify and remove obstacles to the recruitment, retention, and advancement of students, faculty, and staff including those from historically underrepresented populations to maintain a community where people choose to grow, develop and excel.