Textbook: Essentials of Health Justice

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

By Elizabeth Tobin Tyler and Joel Teitelbaum Published by Jones & Bartlett Learning

Essentials of Health Justice: A Primer examines the legal, structural, and justice issues underlying health disparities and other types of health inequities. The authors assess the adequacy of current safety net programs and legal protections affecting the health of vulnerable populations, and look at concrete strategies for bringing about change to promote health justice.  In an academic context, this new text introduces structural determinants of health and health justice in undergraduate and graduate law, public health, medical, nursing, and other health professions courses. In a professional context, it helps make the case for why social determinant of health (SDH) interventions are needed, describes how law must be a critical component of any SDH strategy, and sets up the nuts-and-bolts description of the medical-legal partnership intervention offered in the 2011 textbook, Poverty, Health and Law: Readings and Cases for Medical-Legal Partnership. Essentials of Health Justice was written in part to stimulate understanding among health professions and organizations of the many structural underpinnings of poor patient and population health, and of the legal experts and services that can help remediate both the consequences of these structural problems and the structural problems themselves.