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Training Health Justice Leaders

Training Health Justice Leaders

Educating future health and justice leaders in the medical-legal partnership model holds the opportunity to shape students’ professional identities and create long-term shifts in practice that will lead to better care and outcomes for vulnerable populations.

As a University-based medical-legal partnership (MLP) focused on training the next generation of health and justice leaders using the MLP approach, we are working to define and understand the specific impact of MLPs that have an educational mission, or “Academic MLPs.”

We aim to expand the opportunities for Academic MLPs to collaborate and share best practices and to create a robust community of educators who will contribute to the national MLP movement by training a pipeline of leaders in health and law who graduate ready to work together to advance health justice. We are also undertaking research efforts to understand the impact of MLP-based learning on students across disciplines.

Thanks to the generous support of the Winer Family Foundation in 2019-2020, the Health Justice Alliance convened law clinic faculty who teach in academic MLPs and conducted a national scan of MLPs with an academic partner. HJA also produced a summary of the convening.

A-MLP report cover pageThis national scan was the basis of HJA’s 2022 report, The Academic Medical-Legal Partnership: Training the Next Generation of Health & Legal Professionals to Work Together to Advance Health Justice. Released in collaboration with the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, the report we defines the Academic MLP (A-MLP) as a specific type of MLP with three motivating goals: 1) educating pre-professional learners 2) intentionally creating interprofessional learning environments, and 3) contributing to the evidence base for the MLP model as a health equity intervention.

Prospective Inter-Professional Education Study (Pipeline)

The Health Justice Alliance (HJA) is conducting a longitudinal study of the impact of participating in training, experiential learning and coursework as part of the HJA on students’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, professional identity development, and future career trajectories and activities. Prospective cohorts of Law and Medical students are enrolling in the study each year and participants are followed up at graduation and into their early careers.