Embedded legal professionals work alongside care teams to resolve housing, benefits, employment, and other legal needs that affect recovery—supporting patient stability, reducing stress during healing, and improving access to essential resources.
Many individuals injured by firearms—and their families—often face unmet social needs that hinder their healing and well-being. Many of these needs are interconnected with the legal system and require legal expertise to resolve. One study found that three in four individuals with traumatic injuries also have medical-legal needs.1 Common medical-legal needs include:
Medical-Legal partnerships can address these needs either as standalone interventions or alongside hospital-based violence intervention programs.
Whereas social workers and patient navigators are trained to address some of these medical-legal needs, many legal challenges are complex and require a specialized understanding of federal, state, and local laws.2 Medical-legal partnerships embed legal professionals and advocates into the healthcare team to work directly with patients and their families, alongside their medical teams. They help identify patients’ social needs, and use legal means to advocate for them, remove barriers, and address these needs.
The medical-legal partnership model has been successfully applied to improve health outcomes for people living with HIV and cancer patients, among others.3 Currently, more than 400 medical-legal models are being implemented across healthcare facilities throughout the United States.4
However, despite the need, a scoping review found that few focus specifically on the needs of traumatic injury patients and their families.5 Among those that do, legal experts assist patients to overcome a range of social issues that affect health (e.g., stable housing, employment, debt relief processes, access to public benefits, immigration problems).
The structure of medical-legal partnerships can vary. In some cases, attorneys are hired directly by healthcare institutions; in others, they provide external consulting services through partnerships with outside law firms. Medical-legal partnerships serving injured patients often operate from hospital trauma departments.
One example is Recovery Legal Care, a medical-legal partnership that operates from the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center, in partnership with two nonprofit legal organizations— Legal Aid Chicago and Equal Justice Works.6 The potential for integration of medical-legal partnerships with hospital-based violence intervention programs is still being explored.
In medical-legal partnerships, legal experts and advocates provide four distinct types of services:7