Education and practice collaborations: a pilot case study between a university faculty and county jail practitioners

SUMMARY The purpose of this case study is to present a partnership between faculty and practitioners that initiated a systematic evaluation data collection approach to support program development and study practice in a newly developing occupational therapy program. The Department of Occupational Therapy at Duquesne University collaborated with Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh to introduce occupational therapy as part of a grant-supported community re-integration program at the Allegheny County Jail. In developing the program, the absence of published data regarding the occupational needs among jail inmates was evident. This paper is presented as a case study to demonstrate that faculty-practitioner collaborations can promote the implementation of a viable, systematic evaluation process when implemented as soon as possible in the practice setting. The community-university partnership ensured that a wide variety of knowledge and resource applied to the development of an evaluation process that generated relevant data for each of the partners. The intent of providing systematic evidence for practice can enhance the intervention process and provide valuable professional information. This paper also presents pilot descriptive results from the Occupational Self Assessment (2002) from the initial 67 (61 men & 6 women) inmates in the local Allegheny County Jail Community regarding perceptions of their own occupational competence and of the impact of their environment on their overall occupational adaptation. Using OSA responses, a difference score between reported occupational competence in an activity (rated low) and the correlated importance of the occupation (rated high), the top eight occupational performance areas of concern were identified for the total group, men only and women only. Caution in using the woman data due to the small n is advised. The top eight occupational performance areas of concern for this population included managing my finances, handling my responsibilities, working towards my goals, accomplishing what I set out to do, a place to live and take care of myself, basic things I need to live and take care of myself, things I need to be productive, and a place where I can be productive. Notably, four of these eight items captured the inmates' perceptions of the impact of the environment on their occupational adaptation. This study demonstrates the viability of the academic-practice partnership to support the scholarship of practice and provide a model to embed evidence-gathering through systematic evaluation processes.