Communities of care have untapped power to promote prevention and health justice.
MLPB works with communities of care to enable them to embrace their unique roles in sharing legal information with those they support. In contrast to a medical-legal partnership that offers direct legal representation services, MLPB builds legal knowledge and capacity in care teams and organizations. MLPB’s core activities include training, consultation, and technical assistance.
Training and Tools
Through MLPB’s Unlocking Access training series, partners learn about peoples’ legal rights and the historical and contemporary policies that shape them. Team members are equipped with role-specific guidance on how they can partner with people to meet health-related social needs before they become crises.
Our partners gain access to a monthly web-based livestream and recording through the Unlocking Access Hub. The Hub contains complementary tools, templates, and resources to guide effective problem-solving.
We provide customized training and tools for partners, upon request and as feasible.
Care Team Consultation & Telementoring
MLPB team members provide legal education and problem-solving insight in two ways.
Through consultation, care teams gain confidence in understanding whether a health-related social need has a remedy, and if so, what community-based resources exist to meet it. Ongoing communication helps to identify broader system and policy change strategies that could address the health-harming structural gap. By working together, the entire team’s problem-solving knowledge and skills grow!
Interdisciplinary Team Meetings
Real-time embedding is a critical capacity-building tool for helping teams to spot peoples’ legal risks, rights, and remedies, and strengthen team-based problem-solving.
Rapid-Response Consultations
Available to care team members outside of IDTMs and conducted by email, videoconference, or phone, partners can initiate a consult with us through the Unlocking Access Hub.
System Design and Technical Assistance
We partner with communities of care to assure that people are at the center of social care design. MLPB’s human-centered law and policy expertise can promote sound social care program design that centers prevention, a strengths-based orientation, and awareness of how legal contexts drive available remedies.
As other systems move toward greater integration and deeper upstream impact on people’s lives, we all must look Beyond Screen-and-Refer.
Examples of contexts in which MLPB has offered system design technical assistance:
- Planning for design of housing-focused social care programs;
- Aligning social care program goals with best practices for strengths-based communication; and
- Vetting of community-based organizations for proposed social care partnerships.
MLPB is a certified MassHealth DSRIP TA provider in Massachusetts, and an HSTP partner in Rhode Island.
