Resources
We publish research, tools, and lessons learned to help healthcare and legal organizations build and operate medical-legal partnerships and to help funders and policymakers advance medical-legal partnership activities. You can search those resources in the library below.
The library also links to journal articles, authored both by National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership staff and MLP practitioners and researchers from the field, that highlight ways medical-legal partnerships have improved patient health and well-being, the healthcare workforce, and healthcare delivery. A list of these articles with summaries are also available on the Peer-Reviewed Research page.
Tool: Medical-Legal Partnership Patient And Community Health Pre/Post Survey
The AHEAD Medical-Legal Partnership Patient and Community Health Pre/Post Survey provides a core set of questions that assess the impact of legal interventions on a patient’s perception of her health and the quality of services receives from an MLP. The survey is designed for broad applicability across different intervention models and describes specific administration instructions for the pre- and post- surveys in detail.
Tool: Medical-Legal Partnership Logic Model
The Medical-Legal Partnership Logic Model represents how MLP processes and activities will affect learners, patients, and the health system in the short, medium, and long term.
Tool: Medical-Legal Partnership Learner Pre/Post Survey
The Accelerating Health Equity, Advancing through Discovery (AHEAD) Medical-Legal Partnership Learner Pre/Post Survey includes a core set of questions used to examine the effect—on staff member knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs—of various types of education about social determinants of health and medical-legal partnerships. The survey design supports the evaluation of four Entrustable Professional Activities and six General Physician Competencies and applies across different educational intervention models or intensities, including learners in various health professions.
Sample MLP Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) From a Los Angeles VA Medical Center
Before delivering medical-legal partnership services, health care and legal team members discuss their goals for the program, the responsibilities of each partner, and how they will measure success. When health care organizations choose to contract legal services from a community-based legal services organization (rather than hire lawyers directly to their staff), the decisions partners make should be documented in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This resource is a sample MLP MOU from Inner City Law Center and the Homeless Patient Aligned Care Team of the Department of Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System outlining their medical-legal partnership for Veterans.
Screening Tool for MLP Legal Needs in Health Care Settings
The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, with pro bono support from The Advisory Board Company (ABC), reviewed 80 tools used by medical-legal partnerships across the country to screen for patients’ legal needs. We then developed a common screening tool that can be used by hospitals and health centers in a range of settings. The tool includes: a customizable screening guide template and patient authorization tools; a pick list of questions about specific health-harming legal issues and populations so that each medical-legal partnership can select questions related to the specific issues it addresses; and an evaluation form to help staff who administer the screener measure its success.
How Legal Services Help the Health Care System Address Social Needs: An I-HELP™ Messaging Chart
This chart shows some of the most common social problems faced by vulnerable communities, and how legal expertise and services can help mitigate their negative impact on health and health care. It can be used as a training tool and also to help communicate the value of an MLP. It is organized by the I-HELP™ acronym developed by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership to describe common health-related social and legal needs.