Medical-Legal Partnership

Helping Vulnerable Individuals and Families Meet Their Basic Needs

Not every illness has a biological remedy.  A family forced to choose between food and heat in the winter months cannot be treated with a prescription or a vaccination.  Similarly, an asthmatic person will never breathe symptom free – no matter how much medication is administered – if he or she returns from the doctor’s office to mold-infested housing, as thousands do.

All over the U.S., health care providers who take care of low-income individuals and families are turning to a new specialist to help keep them healthy and safe: lawyers who practice poverty law.

Medical-legal partnerships integrate lawyers in a health setting to help patients navigate the complex government and community systems that often hold solutions to many social determinants of health – income supports for food insecure families, utility shut-off protection during cold winter months, and mold removal from the home of asthmatics.

From Local Program to National Center

January 2009

The Medical-Legal Partnership for Children was founded in 1993 by Dr. Barry Zuckerman as a local program serving patient-families at Boston Medical Center and affiliated health centers.  A staunch advocate for children, Dr. Zuckerman nevertheless found that his skills as a doctor were insufficient to keep his low-income pediatric patients healthy.   His innovation – bringing poverty lawyers into the medical setting to help families – led to dozens of likeminded doctors and lawyers establishing medical-legal partnerships in their communities.  In April 2006, MLPC launched its National Center to support the transformation of health care and legal service delivery through the expansion, advancement, and integration of the medical-legal partnership model.  Since 2006, the National Center has provided technical assistance to partnership sites, facilitated the MLP Network, and coordinated national research and policy activities related to preventive law, health disparities, and the social determinants of health.

In January 2009, MLPC’s National Center officially became the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership (NCMLP) signaling both an expanded clinical focus to serve all vulnerable populations and a bifurcation of Boston’s local and national offices. As part of this transition, Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston was established, which carries the designation of MLP Network Founding Site.

About the “C” in MLPC:  While the National Center was created with a primary focus toward serving children and families, we’ve increasingly provided technical assistance to partnerships outside of pediatrics – helping to cultivate medical-legal partnership in settings that serve vulnerable adults, families and children. Our new name is meant to broaden the focus, application and Network to include all vulnerable populations. Our shortened acronym reflects that medical-legal partnership is an intervention that works not only in pediatrics, but in all clinical and disease populations.