About Us
The Health Sciences University of the Future
Southern California University of Health Sciences (SCU) is an accredited, nonprofit university offering degree and certificate programs across a wide range of conventional and complementary healthcare disciplines. Founded in 1911, we have spent more than a century educating healthcare professionals, challenging convention, and helping move healthcare forward.
Today, we’re building on that history as the nation’s first Integrative, Whole Health University—preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals for where healthcare is heading.
The Need for Change
Healthcare has made extraordinary advances in diagnosing and treating disease. Yet those advances alone have not been enough to solve some of our most persistent health challenges. Costs continue to rise, chronic disease remains widespread, mental health needs are growing, inequities persist, care is often fragmented, and health outcomes lag behind those of other high-income countries.
These realities are prompting healthcare leaders to think more broadly about health and the role of healthcare—expanding the focus from strictly treating illness to maximizing wellness.
This movement is gaining momentum nationally. The U.S. Surgeon General, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are among those calling for a broader understanding of what it means to help people be healthy. At SCU, we’re not simply embracing that vision. We’re working to make it a reality.
Our Approach
Caring for the Whole Person
At SCU, we believe health and quality of life are shaped by many things: how we feel emotionally, how we live, our relationships, our environment, our life circumstances, and what matters most to us. That belief is at the heart of our Whole Health approach.
We teach students to go beyond asking, What’s wrong, and how do we treat it?, to consider: What matters most to this person? What’s affecting their health? What could help them feel better, function better, and live a fuller, more meaningful life?
We want every graduate to carry that understanding of the person behind the patient into their profession.
Working Together Across Disciplines
The most effective healthcare rarely happens in isolation. Different health professionals bring different expertise to the table, and patients may benefit from several of them working together.
That’s why Interprofessional Education is an important part of the SCU experience. Students learn with, from, and about other health professions—understanding what other providers do, when their expertise may benefit a patient, and how to work together effectively.
Working across disciplines also means understanding the different approaches to care that may benefit a patient. That’s the idea behind Integrative Healthcare: considering a range of evidence-informed conventional and complementary approaches based on each patient’s individual needs and preferences.
Put simply, we want our graduates to be excellent at what they do—and to understand how their expertise fits into a much bigger picture.
Advancing Health Equity
Seeing the whole person also means understanding that not everyone has the same opportunities to be healthy. Where we live, work, learn, and grow matters. So does access to healthcare, nutritious food, safe environments, education, economic opportunity, and the many other resources that make good health easier—or harder—to achieve.
We want SCU graduates to understand those realities and how they can affect both health and access to care—and to be prepared to care for people whose lives, backgrounds, circumstances, and experiences may be very different from their own.
And we believe opportunity matters on our side of healthcare, too. By creating more pathways into the health professions and offering flexible ways to learn, SCU is working to make healthcare education accessible to more people—and to help build a healthcare workforce prepared to serve a wide range of communities.
Seeing the whole person. Working together across disciplines. Expanding opportunity for better health and healthcare. These ideas are at the heart of who we are—and how we’re preparing students for what’s next.
“Perhaps the biggest risk facing the efforts to improve health and well-being for all, is to fail to realize that this requires not simply improvement upon the existing system but true transformation. ”Tracy Gaudet, MD
Co-Founder of Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change
Executive Director of SCU Doctor of Whole Health Leadership Program
“Despite remarkable breakthroughs and innovations in treating disease, the United States has worse health outcomes than most other developed countries and at a substantially higher cost…The nation has focused on developing new cures to disease but has neglected to advance the science and systems of how we deliver care, which is essential to ensuring that the right people get the right care at the right time.”National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
“Achieving Whole Health: A New Approach for Veterans and the Nation” 2023
“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when disability comes, but all along the way.”
Atul Gawande
MD, Surgeon, Writer, and Public Health Researcher
“This is a new principle for treatment; previously treatments targeted the cancer cells. This [a whole health approach] targets the hosts.”James Allison and Tasuku Honjo
2018 Nobel Prize Winners
SCU Quick Facts
- Accredited, nonprofit institution
- Retention rate of 95%
- Student loan default rate of 0%
- 1,500 students, 341 faculty
- 11.5 to 1 student to faculty ratio
- 25-acre campus
- 3 SCU Health clinics receiving 50K patient visits/yr (student clinical experience)
- 14 partner health centers and hundreds of clinical training sites
- 20+ student clubs and organizations
- Hundreds of events to support personal well-being (e.g. yoga, sound baths, Wellness Wednesdays, nutrition workshops, mental health counseling…)
- Wide-ranging resources to support academic and professional success (e.g. Interprofessional Education workshops, tutoring, career services…)