A New National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership Website for a New Era

This year marks the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s (NCMLP) 20th anniversary and so much has changed in the medical-legal partnership movement over the last two decades.

We’ve expanded. The medical-legal partnership (MLP) field has grown from 31 partnerships nationwide when NCMLP opened its doors in 2006 to more than 500 MLP programs today. We’ve proven the model is effective. NCMLP and researchers across the country have built a strong evidence base for the ways that MLP benefits patients, the healthcare workforce, healthcare delivery, and healthcare costs. And we’ve helped health care recognize legal services as essential to health. There are now pathways through Medicaid, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and other systems to support cross-sector partnerships.

As the MLP movement has grown, so has our knowledge about how best to implement and sustain the MLP model in different settings. There are more tools than ever before to help new partnerships get started and to help existing partnerships grow. So, we launched our new website to better tell the story of what medical-legal partnership can do and how our movement and organization have evolved. We also made it easier to search and access critical resources to do this work, review research about MLP, and connect with opportunities to gather and learn from one another.

Our collective work as a movement is far from over. The need for MLP services in our communities continues to grow. As we at NCMLP turn our focus to structural reforms that will support justice, health equity, and MLP work on a larger scale, we will continue to share lessons, stories, and tools to keep driving this work forward. And you can find them all here on our new website. Here is to the next 20 years of advancing health equity and justice together!

If you have questions about the new website or about our work, contact us.