Promoting Healthy Urban Planning through Interprofessional Education: Reflections on a Programme for Planning and Medical Students

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The objective of Healthy Urban Planning (HUP), like sustainable development, offers significant opportunities to increase the environmental quality of towns and play a positive role in citizens' quality of life. However, this approach faces a wide range of challenges in its effective implementation, including a number of institutional factors, amongst which are constraints emanating from disciplinary outlooks and the traditional roles of the professional groups involved. One potential approach to overcome this barrier is to promote HUP through interprofessional education, specifically establishing a learning environment that brings together those from the disciplines of medicine and urban planning, with the aim of promoting a mutual understanding of HUP. This paper reflects on the experience of bringing together undergraduate students from medicine and planning to explore the concept of HUP in a real life project focusing on the impacts of an urban motorway extension. This experience revealed a number of unexpected outcomes of such a collaboration and points to the value of interprofessional education as a way of increasing interest in some of the key challenges now facing society and preparing a future workforce fit to take on these challenges.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dr Morison is Director of the Centre for Excellence in Interprofessional Education at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). The main focus of Dr Morison’s research is healthcare education and how this shapes the practitioners of the future. Although much of her work centres around the work of healthcare professionals she has recently worked in collaboration with Dr Geraint Ellis a Senior Lecturer in the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering, to develop an interprofessional programme for medical and planning students.

Dr. Geraint Ellis is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Planning Studies in the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen's University, Belfast. He is an advisor to the UK's Academy for Sustainable Communities and the Centre for Education in the Built Environment. His main research interests lie in the fields of sustainable development, governance of land use regulation and planning pedagogy.