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The value and impact of health justice partnership

We’re working with health justice partnerships to identify how combining health and legal services can make a difference and for whom.

Health justice partnerships place legal help in healthcare settings to support those with intersecting legal and social problems that create barriers to health and wellbeing and hold people in cycles of disadvantage and struggle.

Health Justice Australia collaborates with legal services and health professionals nationwide to initiate and support these partnerships and to learn about their impact.

By working together, health and legal practitioners address the health harming legal problems many people face, and redesign how services are delivered to those who need it most.

What we want to achieve through shared outcomes

We are bringing together a range of experts to explore the value of health justice partnership to health partners, to legal partners, to clients and to communities. Through this work, we are developing a shared outcomes framework, including outcome indicators and tools to measure them. 

We’re asking questions like:

  • What difference does it make for clients to have health and legal services working together in one place?
  • Do health justice partnerships improve the capacity of services and practitioners to address complex need?
  • Do these partnerships increase communities’ access to legal help when and where it’s needed most?
  • Are health justice collaborations an effective way to address complex problems and create lasting solutions?

Why now?

There is increasing investment in health justice partnership evaluation, but we are seeing great variation across the landscape in what is measured and how. And many services are crying out for support to evaluate this innovative way of working.

By coming together to build consistent, quality indicators and data collection tools we can improve the capacity for health justice partners to learn from their own work and share their findings with others.

To do this we need to build a common vision for measuring outcomes because with shared metrics and consistent, high-quality data we can better identify and support the benefits of health justice partnership. We can also learn what we need to do to improve. And this is where we need your help.

If you or a member of your team would like to collaborate with Health Justice Australia on this work, please get in touch at healthjustice@healthjustice.org.au

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