By: Kate Marple. Published by: National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. Published in 2015

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This guide shows how civil legal aid and health care providers can partner on issues around income, housing and utilities, education and employment, legal status, and personal stability. It identifies the civil legal aid interventions, the related social determinant of health, and impact on health/health care. The guide provides four medical-legal partnership messages for health care audiences.

Highlights include:

• “Every low-income person has 2-3 unmet civil legal needs that create barriers to health eating, healthy housing, employment and safety. Addressing those needs improves a person’s health and helps medical treatments work more effectively” (p. 2).
• “To be effective, medical-legal partnerships must deliver many different messages based on their specific goals and the community and institutions where they work” (p. 4).

Categories: Delivery systems (e.g., MLPs), Health, Health, Legal Aid Practitioners, Medical-Legal Partnerships, National