Health justice partnerships place legal help in healthcare settings and teams to support people with intersecting legal and social problems. These intersecting needs often create barriers to health and wellbeing and hold people in cycles of disadvantage and struggle. By working together, health and legal practitioners can address the health-harming legal problems many people face, and redesign how services are delivered to those who need them most.
These place-based initiatives put the needs of their communities at their centre, so the strategies and processes adopted by individual partnerships, how they’re implemented and reviewed, and how they change over time can look different in response to local context. This context includes community need, local infrastructure and services, resources and funding, tools and capabilities, community voice and leadership, collaborative appetite of partners, and the readiness of partners to see and respond to complex problems differently in order to achieve health equity and justice.
In this resource, we outline the most common characteristics we see in health justice partnership across Australia.
This resource discusses:
- Embedding legal help into the healthcare team
- Referral pathways
- Interdisciplinary training
- Secondary consultation
- Care coordination
- Policy, advocacy and systemic change
