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Health, justice and ageing: building on the discussion

As our population ages, it is likely that the impact of older people’s vulnerability to unmet legal need and poor health will also increase. Relevant issues include:

  • the impact of increased isolation and/or dependency on others;
  • the impact of growing rates of chronic illness and disability;
  • the way that legal need can compound and be compounded by poor health or other circumstances of life; and
  • the likelihood that existing gaps in service effectiveness will be exacerbated, especially for people who are hard to reach and experience complex needs.

Health justice partnerships are working to support older people vulnerable to complex legal need, particularly in relation to elder abuse. Through the integration of a lawyer within a healthcare setting, health justice partnerships have been found to provide ‘improved capacity to identify and assist’ people experiencing elder abuse.

Health justice partnerships are just some of the many ways legal and other services work to meet the legal needs of older people broadly.

Meanwhile, health practitioners have been seeking support from lawyers and others to help healthcare teams address legal issues arising in the care and treatment of older people. These issues include:

  • advanced care planning and directives;
  • supported and assisted decision making;
  • end of life care and palliative care; and
  • assisted dying legislation.

Our health, justice and ageing roundtable

Health Justice Australia convened a roundtable on health, justice and ageing with participants drawn from community legal services that were experienced in providing services to meet the legal needs of older people. We wanted to hear what practitioners thought would be useful in evaluation, policy design and service delivery to support older people vulnerable to unmet legal need. Key issues discussed at the roundtable included:

  • Knowledge and its translation: What do we know about the extent of unmet legal need among older people and the service models already operating to meet that need?
  • Building capability: To what extent can we demonstrate the effectiveness of existing models to meet complex legal and health needs among older people?
  • Driving systems change: What are the barriers to service effectiveness and expansion to better meet the legal and health needs of older people, particularly where those needs are complex or compound each other?

Participants identified a range of unmet legal needs already affecting older people; what health justice partnerships and other services were doing to meet these needs; and what role and capacity exists to build capability between different practitioners and service settings.

Our report on the issues identified at the roundtable is now available online.

Taking it further

Building on this discussion, Health Justice Australia is co-presenting ‘Health, justice and ageing: a symposium’ in partnership with the Law Health Justice Research Centre, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney and Older Persons Advocacy Network.

The symposium will feature a keynote address from Professor Liz Tobin Tyler on the importance of collaboration between healthcare providers and legal professionals in the elder care context. Professor Tobin Tyler is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Health Services at Brown University (USA) and was awarded the Distinguished Advocate award by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership in the USA for her work promoting the medical-legal partnership model and for developing interprofessional medical-legal education. The keynote will be followed by two engaging panels exploring practitioner, service, research and consumer perspectives. The first panel will explore the needs of older people in terms of health, justice and being treated with dignity by service systems. The second panel will explore some of the innovative ways the health and justice needs of older people are already being met and build collaboration across shared interests to further this agenda.

The Symposium will be held on 21 March in Sydney.

Update:

Related content

This report discusses whether and how health justice partnerships achieve financial wellbeing outcomes for their clients, how they work with financial counsellors and the opportunities and constraints of addressing financial wellbeing.

Report