In medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), legal professionals work on-site in the health care setting to address civil legal needs that adversely affect health and increase health care utilisation.
Legal needs are not currently part of the language of health care, nor is legal care a tool in the toolbox health care team members use to treat patients or address population on health.
The connection between legal needs and health is invisible in the current provision of health care. Overcoming this invisibility requires transforming how health care team members understand and screen for these needs as well as how clinics and health care teams respond to the identified needs.
The connection between legal needs and health is invisible in the current provision of health care. Overcoming this invisibility requires transforming how health care team members understand and screen for these needs as well as how clinics and health care teams respond to the identified needs.
Context
Patients with complex health and social needs utilise emergency departments and health clinics, and are hospitalised at rates far higher than the general population. These high-need, high-cost patients make up only a small percentage of admissions, however they account for a large percentage of all hospital visits in a given year.
Sometimes referred to as “super utilisers” — a moniker that perhaps unfairly stigmatises these (generally poor) individuals as patients who are not truly in need of the services they seek — these high-need, high-cost patients are less likely to benefit from coordinated care models and have, on average, more unaddressed health-harming social or civil legal needs that result in poor health outcomes.
Purpose
MLPs seek out to prevent costly medical episodes though treatment of the whole person.
Staff in a health care setting screen patients to determine if they have health-harming legal needs.
By resolving the legal issue, the patient’s health may be improved, translating into cost savings on the medical side.