Health Justice Australia has been working with Neami National, a large non-government organisation that runs mental health and wellbeing services across Australia, to set up health justice partnerships (HJPs) in three Neami service sites.
As part of this work, we collaborated with Neami to run a survey exploring the types of legal issues that arise for Neami consumers, and what Neami staff feel they need to support clients with these issues.
Legal issues can affect your mental health, and mental health issues can affect your legal situation. It’s why mental health services are a great fit for health justice partnership, which brings legal help into health and community care settings.
Types of legal needs at Neami National
Non-legal professionals, like mental health workers, have a vital role in linking people experiencing legal issues with the legal help they would otherwise not access at all or in a timely manner.
People with unmet legal need are more likely to be in contact with trusted workers in health and community settings than directly with legal professionals and services.
We found that frontline staff in these mental health and wellbeing services often see clients with unmet legal need – most commonly credit, debt and social security issues, housing, family law and family violence.
Two thirds of respondents said they spent at least half their time ‘responding to these types of issues’, and yet they still don’t necessarily have what they need to connect their consumers with legal help.
How can we get clients appropriate and accessible legal help?
Although more than 90% of survey respondents agreed that legal issues affect consumers’ wellbeing, nearly half said they didn’t know where to refer them for legal help. And more than half of respondents didn’t feel confident in communicating with lawyers and legal services about issues facing consumers.
Frontline mental health workers need more support to address legal issues facing their clients, particularly more knowledge of other services, connections with professionals in other organisations and connections with community. Survey respondents also said they could benefit from additional processes, tools and resources, and time to manage their case load.
So, what now?
The report clearly shows that clients who access mental health services have unmet legal needs, and that those unmet legal needs – whether related to credit, debt and social security issues, housing, or family law and family violence issues – affect their health and wellbeing.
Frontline staff in these service settings feel expected to respond to these legal needs, even when survey responses indicate they simply aren’t equipped to know how: more than half don’t know where to refer clients to legal help, more than half are not confident in communicating with lawyers and legal services about issues facing consumers, and a further a quarter find the thought of helping consumers to get legal help overwhelming.
Health justice partnerships may offer a solution. Integrating legal help into services that support health and wellbeing can help address the social and legal issues that contribute to poor health outcomes, providing a holistic service that is more than the sum of its parts.
Read more about our work with Neami National:
The Email Newsletter
Subscribe to our quarterly email newsletter and stay up to date with what’s happening at Health Justice Australia.
