Preventing homelessness in 15 minutes
When a patient’s mother called pediatrician Megan Sandel to say her housing voucher was going to be cancelled and her family was going to become homeless, the medical-legal partnership was able to prevent it…in 15 minutes....Read More
Housing help that paved the way for cancer surgery and remission
When a Nebraska woman canceled her mastectomy because she received an eviction notice and feared she would not have a place to recover, the medical-legal partnership team went to work. Oncologist Kerry Rodabaugh recalls the journey that ended with remission....Read More
Improving blood sugar with food benefits
When Eric Campbell’s blood sugar suddenly went up, his doctor asked him, “What changed?” He said his food benefits had decreased. While helping Eric, the medical-legal partnership team at Whittier Clinic found an administrative error that affected hundreds of families....Read More
When cancer care is more than chemotherapy
Being told you have cancer is overwhelming, so is undergoing treatment. But for Lonnie Evans, it was hard to focus on getting better when he couldn't keep working and was denied disabilities benefits and public health insurance....Read More
Ending the trade off between food and medication
Faced with making choices between food and medicine, Norris Nicholson chose to eat. But without his medications, his heart became weaker and he suffered multiple heart attacks. He had to get insurance if he was going to get better....Read More
Using the Law to Inform Empowered Patient Care in Austin
The same year that People’s Community Clinic in Austin became a Federally Qualified Health Center in 2012, it began offering on-site legal services to its patients. Ask the health care providers and administrators at People’s if it was weird to suddenly have a lawyer walking around, consulting on cases and seeing patients, and the answer you’ll get from everyone is pretty much the same: “No. That’s just the kind of place People’s is.” In the first in a series of medical-legal partnership origin stories, we...Read More
“I can’t imagine practicing medicine without a lawyer.”
Health care providers from across the country share the moments that they realized having lawyers in their clinics was critical to providing care....Read More
“We ask the questions because now we have solutions.”
If you don't think you can help with a problem, you won't ask about it. Having a lawyer on the team has given health care providers confidence that if they ask about social factors, there is help, and that intractable problems have solutions....Read More
“Working with lawyers removes the excuse of non-compliance.”
Dr. Bob Pettignano from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta says having lawyers on the team make residents and physicians dig deeper when patients don’t comply with medical treatments....Read More
Ensuring people with chronic conditions maintain access to care
When Whitman-Walker Health in Washington, D.C. hired its first in-house lawyer in 1986, it was to help HIV and AIDS patients write wills, secure disability benefits, and fight discrimination—all to ease suffering as they prepared for the end of life. Thankfully, advancements in medical treatment mean that people with HIV and AIDS are living longer, healthier lives. It also means that the health center’s now 10 attorneys, two paralegals, and 15 insurance navigators play a very different role in patient care. Among other things, they...Read More
Increasing nutritional supports for newborns
When Javana Bradford took her one-month old daughter, Augyst, for a checkup at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, pediatrician Melissa Klein asked if she and her daughter were getting enough to eat. Ms. Bradford said she was having trouble adding Augyst to her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, commonly known as food stamps. Dr. Klein referred her to Deanna White, a paralegal at the hospital’s medical-legal partnership (MLP) with the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati. To add a newborn to a mother’s SNAP...Read More
Keeping children safe from lead poisoning
The first sign that a home has a lead hazard is usually when a child tests positive for lead poisoning. Despite the fact that more than four million children in the United States live in federally assisted housing and many of those units are decades old, homes are not assessed for lead hazards before families move in. Because of Chicago’s old housing stock, providers at Erie Family Health Centers vigilantly check children’s lead levels every six months until the child is four, and whenever there...Read More
Eliminating hurdles to life saving medication
The moment you’re exposed to the HIV virus, a clock starts ticking. You have 72-hours to begin taking medication that greatly reduces your risk of contracting the virus, and the sooner you start taking it, the more effective it is. If you go to Whitman-Walker Health in Washington, D.C. and report an exposure, it triggers their “red carpet service.” This means you don’t wait for an appointment; you see a nurse and an insurance navigator immediately, and leave with a prescription for a Post-Exposure Prophylaxis...Read More