The shutdown in response to Covid19 hit Australia in March 2020. Within the space of a week, health and legal services across the country went from business as usual to closed shopfronts and service settings, as practitioners moved to providing their services remotely by phone and online.
Health Justice Australia has stayed in close contact with our national network of health justice partnership practitioners during this time. We have identified phenomenal agility and capacity for innovation, as legal assistance services that previously had little capacity or investment in the infrastructure to work remotely undertook massive activity to ensure that clients and patients could still access the help they needed during this time.
The importance of maintaining such access was reflected in the reports from services that, while they were seeing some reduction in their usual volume of clients, those who were coming to them for help had some of the most pressing needs, for instance in relation to family violence.
At the same time, an entire frontline of practitioners was now supporting people through the most pressing problems in their lives while stuck at home and without the usual supports that our workplaces provide. Not only did practitioners need to protect their families from the sometimes confronting elements of their work, they also had to look after their own wellbeing while isolated from the colleagues, supervisors and professional structures that would normally look after practitioner health and wellbeing.
A national survey
Recognising there were going to be significant challenges in meeting people’s health and legal needs during Covid19, Health Justice Australia surveyed our national network to identify emerging themes and convened a national practitioner network meeting to inform our support for health justice partnership during the global pandemic. The findings of this survey and the feedback as we convened our network provide keen insight into the critical role of legal help to address the everyday problems in people’s lives and their impact on health. They show a network of services responding to the challenge of operating in this time with enduring commitment, borne from the unprecedented environment in which health justice partnerships are operating in 2020, and laying the groundwork for further service innovation in years to come.
