Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston

A new report shows how medical-legal partnership can be effective in changing internal and regulatory systems. Using MLP | Boston's utility access advocacy as an example, the report highlights how MLPs move from patients to policy.

The letter cut right to the point: Hawah Jackson’s lights would be turned off by the end of the month if she didn’t pay overdue utility bills totaling hundred of dollars. Jackson, a nurse at a rehabilitation hospital, said she didn’t have the money and worried how her 22-year-old severely disabled daughter, Binah, would cope if the power in their Dorchester home was shut off.

Guide provides an overview of how clinical partners can advocate for their patients unmet basic needs and offers take home points, screening questions and case examples in each of the "I-HELP" issue areas.

New report from Children’s Health Watch and Medical-Legal Partnership Boston finds that subsidized housing plays a significant role in protecting young children from food insecurity and the health risks of being seriously underweight.

Joint MLP | Boston and C-SNAP report examines Boston’s hidden homeless population and proposes short- and long-term policy changes to help families heat and eat...

Interview about the Healthy Homes for Healthy Families project in Boston highlighting why attorneys are important partners in keeping kids healthy and how private law firms are “adopting” local health centers.

WilmerHale LLP is loaning one of its associates to work full-time for six months at the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children (MLPC) at Boston Medical Center. The Pickering Fellowship is named after John H. Pickering, well-known for his lifelong commitment to public interest law and ireless work on behalf of underserved populations...

MLPC received the American Hospital Association NOVA award. The honor recognizes hospitals and health systems for their collaborative efforts toward improving community health.

"She had to choose between heat and food. So Marla (not her real name), a single mother of two, chose food. Marla works full time, but when her child support payments stopped abruptly, she couldn't make ends meet. She got behind on utility payments, and her power was shut off. Marla tried working out a payment plan with the electric company, but was unsuccessful in navigating the bureaucracy..."

"When you think about ways to improve children’s health, creating affordable housing or lowering the cost of energy are not at the top of the list — if they make the list at all. They should, says pediatrician Lauren Smith..."

"Pediatricians at Boston Medical Center provide aggressive care for children, and that can mean calling in a lawyer. It's a team approach that protects children from society's more complex health threats -- from poor nutrition to poorly maintained apartments. Now, with $2.7 million in foundation grants, BMC is going national..."

"Pediatrician Barry Zuckerman used to phone landlords and utility companies to berate them. He would call on behalf of low-income patients, arguing that children needed a mold-free apartment or a heated home to stay healthy. But he got tired of the dialing and diatribes. 'I'd yell,' Dr. Zuckerman says, 'and that still didn't help.'"

"That principle drives a Boston Medical Center program that relies on attorneys, in partnership with physicians and social workers, to help low-income children stay healthy. The lawyers ensure that houses are heated in the winter, help undernourished families apply for food stamps, work to eliminate rodent infestation, and prod landlords to clean up moldy apartments that can trigger asthma, among other tasks..."

David Shipler, the author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America relates a story about how the Boston Medical Center uses lawyers to help poor people get better health care...

Barry Zuckerman was so tired of sending asthmatic children home to apartments full of roaches and mold and of seeing babies who live in unheated homes return to his clinic again and again with lung ailments that he decided to do an undoctorly thing: he enlisted the help of lawyers...

A doctor gets very tired of this kind of thing: sending a child with asthma home to an apartment full of roaches and mold; telling the parents of an anemic toddler to buy more and healthier food when they clearly do not have a cent; seeing babies who live in unheated apartments come in again and again with lung ailments. At Boston Medical Center, the hospital that treats more poor people than any other in Massachusetts, pediatricians got so tired of it that they decided to try a radical solution: getting their own lawyers...