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.
Sample MLP Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from a Florida Health 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 healthcare 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 Grace Medical Home, Inc., a Florida-based community health center, and Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida, Inc. Other organizations can use it as an example to get started on their own MOU.
Leveraging the Electronic Health Record to Link Health Center Patients with MLP Services
This issue brief provides concrete examples of how health centers in Iowa, Montana, and Texas are leveraging the electronic health record (EHR) to complement their screening for the social determinants of health as well as to increase their capacity to deliver targeted medical-legal partnership-related interventions.
The Role of Medical-Legal Partnerships for Socially Vulnerable Older Adults
This fact sheet looks at how integrating medical and legal services for older health center patients can help mitigate these challenges and begin to comprehensively address problems that directly impact a patient’s health and well-being. It examines how these partnerships work, and highlights two medical-legal partnership programs for seniors in San Francisco and Boston.
Impact of a Medical-Legal Partnership Program on Readmissions to a Family Medicine Inpatient Service
A recent study examined the impact of unmet legal needs on hospital readmission rates at the SIU Family and Community Medicine inpatient service at Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Illinois. Data from 2500 hospital discharges were analyzed alongside unmet legal needs identified through an interview-based screening tool. The results show that unmet legal needs appear to be an independent risk factor for hospital readmission.
Medical-Legal Partnership Guide for Agricultural Worker-Serving Organizations
Our nation’s farmworkers endure unsafe living and working conditions. Yet they are often reluctant to seek out help due to fear of employer retaliation, lack of health insurance, or documentation status. This resource provides recommendations and resources to help migrant health and legal services organizations develop medical-legal partnerships to support farmworkers.
Leveraging Legal Services on the Homeless Patient Aligned Care Team
This brief highlights the potential for partnership between the legal community and Homeless Patient Aligned Care Teams (H-PACT) at Veterans Affairs medical centers. It profiles medical-legal partnerships that are successfully tackling the unmet legal needs of Veterans experiencing and at-risk of homelessness through this approach.