A Novel Approach to Campus Health and Wellness: The UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative

The university setting poses distinctive challenges for health and wellness promotion among students. High-risk behaviors remain culturally robust, and risk factors unique to the university environment persist despite awareness among campus policymakers. Compounding these issues, student utilization of university health resources can be low due to lack of visibility, fragmentation, or a lack of identification with a health-promoting culture. The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI) is an integrative and campus-wide collaboration that leverages existing resources and innovates new programs to improve health and wellness. HCI is strategically organized around five core health areas: exercise, nutrition, mental health, built environment, and tobacco prevention. The initiative’s holistic approach targets students, staff, and faculty to enhance the culture around health promotion. This is achieved through a novel coordination of organizational integration, interdisciplinary leadership, and adaptable deployment of resources. As an example, the Health Champions program integrates resources from experts in the recreation department, school of public health, and the HCI to provide short instructional exercise breaks throughout the campus. This session will review the structural and functional components of HCI, describe the challenges and successes of a wide-ranging higher education health initiative at a large and diverse public university, and provide preliminary programmatic outcomes. This session will facilitate adoption of similar multi-faceted approaches to health and wellness promotion in other university settings.