Social ills, such as substandard housing and food insecurity, fuel sicknesses that our health care system must then address. Now more than ever, we are asking the health care delivery system to be in the business of preventing illness. That’s a tall order when so much of what makes people sick are underenforced laws and policies, underfunded public programs, and ill-conceived and/or racist public policies that are outside the scope of what the fee-for-service health care industry and health care professionals are trained to do.
In a piece for the Kaiser Permanente’s Institute for Health Policy, Bethany Hamilton and Ellen Lawton write about the ways medical-legal partnerships address social and structural drivers of health. Click here to read the full article.