Medical Legal Partnership Education: A Survey of Existing Programs and Recommendations for National Curriculum

Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) is an integrative and collaborative model that brings legal services directly into the health care setting to assist patients in maximizing health and social benefits.  Legal remedies can resolve many socioeconomic and environmental issues common to vulnerable and underserved populations.  Also MLPs vary in structure, three components are central to the model: (1) providing direct legal assistance, (2) transforming health and legal institutions, and (3) achieving policy-level change.  These partnerships are uniquely suited to address necessary social and legal needs in an accessible clinical setting.

This research addresses the current MLP educational environment by conducting interviews with MLP educators throughout the country to better understand how health care and law students are prepared to work in this unique, collaborative setting and the current challenges to providing MLP education.  I conducted a qualitative study design to explore the goals of MLP educators as well as barriers and facilitating factors to providing MLP education.  Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Analysis was facilitated by NVivo 10.

Through this research I determined that MLP education is widely varied and includes several different aspects including policy initiatives and legal training for health care providers. MLP educators hope to have additional opportunities for interdisciplinary learning, hands-on learning with patients/clients, and increased teaching and testing of social determinants of health issues.  Additionally, including evaluation metrics in MLPs and in education is critical.