Building a Bridge: Exploring the Intersection of Social Work, Architecture, and Regional and City Planning for Stronger Communities

Abstract

As defined by the World Health Organization, interprofessional practice is the “collaborative practice that happens when multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds work together with patients, families, carers, and communities to deliver the highest quality of care across settings” (World Health Organization, 2010, p. 7). Interprofessional collaborative practice is increasingly recognized as a means of best practice in the field of social work. Growing in momentum, interprofessional collaboration fosters an environment for a variety of professionals to learn from one another and gain greater insight, technique, and perspective on the identified objective. This article presents a case study of the experiences of faculty and graduate students at the University of Oklahoma in the respective fields of social work and regional and city planning as they partnered with the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of housing resources, which included online surveys, focus groups with service providers, community stakeholders, and persons with lived experience of homelessness and/or housing instability. The findings indicate several key themes of the interprofessional collaboration between social work and regional and city planning: 1) reward of partnership, 2) city structures of homelessness, and 3) the multi-contextual factors impacting homelessness. The results suggest that by working with differing professions, faculty and students gained greater experience and opportunity, expanding their scope on modalities, assessment methodologies, analyzation techniques, and additional expertise on large-scale community intervention tactics. These findings have implications for future interprofessional partnerships that could foster dynamic community-level interventions and improvements.