Medical-Legal Partnership Resources

Projects

Promoting Population-Level Health Improvement Through Data

Issue Brief: Legal and Non-Legal Strategies to Improve Childhood Lead Screening Rates in Illinois and Ohio
One of the collaborative projects that emerged from the NCMLP / Network collaboration has focused on improving lead screening rates in Ohio and Illinois. MLPs in those states recognized that childhood lead poisoning was a pervasive problem, but suspected that the scope of the problem was in fact significantly underestimated due to inconsistent lead screening. The MLPs were already working on legal approaches to reduce lead exposure among clients, but they identified a lack of routine lead screening as an obstacle to pursuing wider-spread legal interventions. In response, Network attorneys developed an issue brief examining existing legal screening requirements in the two states and exploring a range of legal and non-legal solutions. Next steps include disseminating the brief among public health and MLP stakeholders across the two states to identify and pursue the most promising strategies.

Scholarship

Liz Tobin Tyler, Aligning Public Health, Health Care, Law and Policy: Medical-Legal Partnership as a Multilevel Response to the Social Determinants of Health, 8 J Health Biomedical L 211 (2012).

In addition, see the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s extensive curated collection of scholarship and resources for and about MLPs, as well as the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps MLP profile

Presentations

Working with Medical-Legal Partnerships to Address Social Determinants of Health Oct. 5, 2018
This session from the 2018 Public Health Law Conference provides a brief introduction to the medical-legal partnership (MLP) model, which embeds lawyers in health care teams to address health harming legal needs, and describes opportunities for MLPs and public health practitioners to work together to address social determinants of health through law. Speakers discuss an ongoing collaboration between the Network for Public Health Law, the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, and several MLPs across the country aimed at scaling patient-level efforts to achieve population-level health improvement. The session features presenters from Los Angeles and Chicago-based MLPs that involve their local health departments as key MLP collaborators. 

Law As a Key Social Determinant of Health: Accelerating Your Population Health Strategy by Integrating Legal Capacity & Skills Dec. 1, 2017       
In an era of healthcare transformation, where health care practitioners seek tools to improve population health, the MLP approach provides a framework for health care teams, public health practitioners, and public interest attorneys to together identify and address individual health harming legal needs and effect legal and policy change. This presentation at the Midwest Forum on Hospitals, Health Systems and Population Health described this patients-to-policy approach and the emerging evidence of impact. A Chicago-based MLP team described their specific project design, and presenters shared strategies for incorporating a public health perspective into MLP planning and practice to support system change through public health legal interventions.

Patients to Policy with Kate Marple, Director of Communications at the National Center for Medical- Legal Partnership
Kate Marple, Director of Communications with the NCMLP, shared her expertise and facilitated discussion during the Network/MLP Coffee Klatch on June 13, 2018. Kate presented on strategies for moving from a patient to policy focus using examples from the NCMLP’s recent story series by the same name (links below).

–        Story 1: Helping Kids Get At-Home Care

–        Story 2: Eliminating Hurdles to Life Saving Medicine

–        Story 3: Keeping Children Safe from Lead Poisoning

–        Story 4: Increasing Nutritional Supports for Newborns

–        Story 5: Ensuring People with Chronic Conditions Maintain Access to Care