Medical-legal partnerships: The biopsychosocial-legal model

Think how useful it would be to have an attorney down the hall ready to help low-income patients with living wills, health care powers of attorney, Medicare problems, disability claims, public housing applications and all the other legal sequelae of disease. Doctors in a growing number of hospitals, residency programs and clinics across the country are finding out just how useful it can be. Medical-legal partnerships are bringing attorneys into the clinical setting to help vulnerable patients cope with the legal dimensions of disease.

The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnerships (NCMLP) lists 81 medical-legal partnerships that are currently serving twice that number of health care facilities across the country. While early medical-legal partnerships focused more on serving children and their families, partnerships are now being set up in family medicine contexts. One of those, the Tucson Family Advocacy Program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, was profiled last year in an Arizona Daily Star article. Other family-medicine-oriented medical-legal partnerships listed by the NCMLP include one in California, one in Iowa and one in Montana. If you are interested in exploring the development of a medical-legal partnership in your area, the NCMLP offers assistance.

Posted at 09:26AM Apr 20, 2009 by Bob Edsall  |  Comments[0]