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Book Review: Universities and Communities: Remaking Professional and Interprofessional Education
Wilma Peebles-Wilkins Affilia 2001 16: 381 DOI: 10.1177/088610990101600307 The online version of this article can be found at: http://aff.sagepub.com/content/16/3/381.citation

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Affilia Fall Book 2001 Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS

Universities and Communities: Remaking Professional and Interprofessional Education. Edited by Jacquelyn McCroskey and Susan D. Einbinder. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998, 336 pp., $68 (hardbound). Intercollegiate or interprofessional collaboration is currently a hot topic in professional education. This book, the result of a 2-year intercollegiate program at the University of Southern California called the Inter-Professional Initiative (IPI), adds significantly to these discussions. Although multidisciplinary teamwork, practice in host settings, and similar content have existed in the social work literature for some time, this edited volume of 19 chapters provides more contemporary perspectives on intercollegiate and university-community partnerships. However, none of the chapters adequately addresses the significant distinctions being made between interdisciplinary, interprofessional or intercollegiate, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Nevertheless, the content is helpful for social work educators during a time when increased teamwork with other disciplines and outreach into communities are important. Universities and Communities is organized into four parts: the challenges of traditional approaches to professional education and the promise of interprofessional approaches, theories of community practice and coordinated systems of care, communitybased university programs and other forms of universitycommunity linkages, and aspects of university fiscal and other management systems that promote or inhibit collaborative work. Although all the chapters make a significant contribution to the knowledge base in this area, chapters 1, 6, and 18 are particularly noteworthy for contemporary social work education and practice.
AFFILIA, Vol. 16 No. 3, Fall 2001 381-399 2001 Sage Publications

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Affilia Fall 2001

In chapter 1, McCroskey outlines important steps for interprofessional education and training, research, and community services associated with universities response to the changing social landscape, human diversity, the needs of poor communities, and the sense of uncertainty surrounding the human services. She presents lessons learned from the IPI project on the process of bringing people together, creating linkages between classroom instruction and community-practice experiences, including all the essential disciplines, and developing effective communication strategies among different kinds of professionals. In chapter 6, Wolch and Walsh discuss the need for an integrated human services delivery system. They describe the contemporary concerns of service fragmentation and lack of coordination, which date back to the days of scientific charity, in relation to labor force participation, poverty rates, welfare reform, and urban geography and present demographic and access data on the delivery of services to children in Los Angeles. In addition, they propose a model for increasing clients access to services that addresses both the unequal distribution of family resources and the location of agency services. In chapter 18, Lerner and his associates describe the opportunities and constraints in creating outreach universities, emphasizing nontraditional approaches such as reorganizing higher education to be more responsive to issueschildren, youth, and familiesthat affect women. Overall, this is a fine collection of articles that explicate community theory, interprofessional educational practices, universities structural impediments, and the need for more nontraditional approaches to stimulate the development of university-community partnerships.
WILMA PEEBLES-WILKINS School of Social Work Boston University

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