Medical-Legal Partnership: Prevention, Access to Justice and the Next Generation of Legal and Healthcare Professionals.

Abstract

Inequality of access to legal services is a significant problem in Australia.

In a panel discussion Dr. Curran of the Australian National Research gave a short paper responding to the key note address by Liz Tobin Tyler, Adjunct Professor, the Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health on the topic ‘Medical-legal partnership: Prevention, access to justice and the next generation of legal and healthcare professionals.’

In the response Dr. Curran noted similarities and difference between the USA and Australia and reports on her participatory action research that ANU has been commissioned to undertake in a range of Health Justice Partnerships (HJP) including the embedded research evaluation of ACR Justice Bendigo pilot of an HJP which commenced in January 2015. The Executive Officer of ARC Justice, Peter Noble has also asked Dr. Curran to measure impacts of the HJP on the social determinants of health which she is grappling with given international recognition of the challenge. Dr. Curran has come up with some tools informed by affected community, service providers and international research in an action research collaborative approach within a continuous learning, reflection and development model and is using these to measure in concrete terms the social determinants of health outcomes from the HJP.

Dr. Curran discussed a number of Australian HJP evaluations in terms of quality, impact, outcomes and the social determinants of health. She discusses tools and some preliminary findings in the various research projects which are ongoing.