The new National Access to Justice Partnership is a great start in making frontline legal assistance services sustainable for the benefit of the whole community. While we’re talking about funding for legal assistance, let’s take a look at some of the wide-ranging benefits of having legal help available in more ways to more people.
Our work at Health Justice Australia is all about what happens when lawyers work together with health professionals and other social services to approach complex problems in people’s lives in a holistic way. You can’t put someone’s health, family life, cultural safety and financial wellbeing in separate boxes and pretend they don’t touch each other if you want to help them effectively.
How financial wellbeing is linked to your health
Imagine you can’t afford to see a doctor when you’re unwell, or you can’t afford to take time off work for surgery you need. Your health might get worse to the point of losing your job. You might wind up with credit card debts, or fines from public transport fares you couldn’t pay. The stress from that might get in the way of finding a new job or cause new health problems.
“What we know from the research literature is that financial issues are both a cause and a consequence of health issues, and a cause and a consequence of legal issues. There’s not a simple, linear relationship between these things – they are intersecting and overlapping and reinforcing issues.” – Ruth Pitt, author of Health Justice Partnership and Financial Wellbeing report
Breaking out of silos with health justice partnership
One in five Australians, often the most disadvantaged in our community, have legal problems that they don’t do anything about – that’s part of the rationale for health justice partnership. They might not even see the issue as a legal problem, or they might be too stressed, or worry they can’t afford it or don’t have the time. When people do ask for help, they’re more likely to ask a non-legal advisor, like their doctor, than a lawyer. Health justice partnership recognises that and works to support those professionals people are turning to. Through partnership, we can meet people where they’re at to offer legal help.
“Families don’t often just have one challenge, they have two or three or four challenges. Unfortunately our system doesn’t work like that. You have to move between silos if you’re the family, whereas really we should looking at, what are the needs of the families? And then how do we orient the system around those families? Rather than what we have at the moment, which is the family having to orient themselves around the system.” – Professor Sharon Goldfeld, Centre for Community Child Health
Health justice partnerships use a variety of strategies to integrate legal help into services that support people’s health and wellbeing. A partnership might include on-site lawyers in health settings for easy warm referrals, secondary consultations to give health and social workers the right advice, or holistic wrap-around services.
What health justice partnership can do for financial wellbeing through access to justice
We asked lawyers working in health justice partnerships how often the legal help they provided in the past 12 months was related to various financial issues. Nearly all of them said they’d helped with issues related to financial abuse, and most had helped with fines and infringements, as well as credit/debt issues. Other financial issues that health justice partnerships helped out with included issues with Centrelink, child support claims, tenancy issues and mortgage issues. Not only would many of those people not have asked for legal help without a health justice partnership, they may not even have realised that a lawyer could do anything about these problems.
“I had a 14-year-old girl in country Victoria who was living with her father. She was unable to go to school because she has some neurodiverse issues and she’d disengaged with school. They had just enrolled her in the Victorian virtual school when Dad got an eviction notice from his house….I saw that there was a lawyer through Health Justice Australia in their local community health centre and I emailed the dad and said hey, you can go there. You can go for free for a men’s health checkup and this is your way in to see the lawyer. And that’s what he did. And the lawyer was able to help with housing support and I’m really pleased to say they’ve now got a house with stable housing and not having to live in their car, and that means huge influence and help for this young girl because she can now have a stable base from which to continue her education.” – Professor Harriet Hiscock, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Using what you have, where you are, for clients and community
Because health justice partnership is a collaborative strategy, not a fixed model of service delivery, each partnership has the flexibility to adapt its work to the needs of the local community and the resources available to the partnering organisations.
We can see this in the diversity of approaches to financial wellbeing across the health justice landscape. 84% of partnerships we surveyed chose to work with financial counsellors, but some hired a financial counsellor directly, while others built a strong referral pathway that better fits their local context. This place-based approach puts communities at the centre and makes space for partnerships to adapt over time.
“After talking to diverse HJPs from around Australia, what would I recommend when it comes to HJPs and financial wellbeing outcomes? To practitioners, I’d suggest starting by thinking about the needs and strengths of your clients, and then the needs and existing resources in your community. And to funders wanting to support such work, I’d suggest embracing the diversity of health justice partnerships, considering how to provide funding in way that enables local decision-making and allows services to work in ways that best suits clients and community.” – Ruth Pitt, author of Health Justice Partnership and Financial Wellbeing report
Resourcing tailored solutions to complex problems
If we want to break services out of their silos and help people more effectively, we need to break funding out of its silos too. Health justice partnerships can have a hard time securing the resources they need for their vital access to justice work because they don’t fit into the boxes government funding is divided into at the top.
“We continue to find it very challenging to get funding for the work that we do. There is still very much a strong belief that Department of Justice should only fund lawyers, Department of Communities should only fund key workers. And although we are told there are discussions around co-commissioning, we are yet to see this materialise.” – General Manager, Ruah Legal Services
It takes time to build relationships, build the capability of staff to work in partnership, and establish good working practices across the team, with effective communication and ongoing conversations about how to best work together. It also takes time to understand and adapt to the needs of the local community. Short-term funding can derail the work a partnership was set up for as staff redirect their effort into fundraising and applying for grants.
“Do we really want to invest all this time in trying to set up a service where we just have to pull the plug in, you know, seven months’ time? So yeah, it’s all about funding, and the right funding. It’s got to be multi-year funding. And it’s got to be someone, a funder, who understands our vision and understands that it’s going to take time.” – Manager, Seniors Law
We can choose to support the health and wellbeing of our community
Health is not just about seeing a doctor. A healthy community is one in which everyone has access to help when they need it – and that includes legal help.
“In health we talk about something called the social determinants of health, but what we really mean are the things that can affect health that aren’t about health themselves or even about health services. We know that health services contribute only about 10% to people’s actual health, so there’s all this other stuff around people that makes a difference.” – Professor Sharon Goldfeld, Centre for Community Child Health
A strong investment in access to justice will have a critical effect on social determinants of health across our communities.
