About Us

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”