I would encourage all medical legal partnerships to use students. I’ve found that the extern experi- ence has been very useful not only from a practitioner’s point of view because I can delegate work to them, but also because I know that from my own internship experience, that I didn’t get to work very closely with an attorney. So in our particular MLP we are a single office which means the student has the perspective of everything from the beginning to end of the case and I really encourage their participation.
49 APPENDIX A
Pam Tames, Attorney and former Director of Training at Medical-Legal Partnership |
Boston:
[O]ne of my colleagues, Ellen Lawton, working with a resident early on created something called the code card which was very popular with healthcare providers, particularly residents who don’t have offices, don’t have desks, needed a small code card that they could carry around with them in the same way that they carry a code card for dealing with asthma, or dealing with cardiac arrest; what are the basic signs, what do you need to do in emergencies, who do you call … we had these advocacy code cards which had lists of resources that people could … refer to that had basic infor- mation … That was very popular for a while probably for the better part of 5 years. We tried … a method of flowcharting a legal problem or a social problem and what would you do with it … we knew this method is the method that residents learn during their residency program and so we tried to use a method that they had and insert legal or social information and that was probably popular for 2 or 3 years. But during the entire time that I worked at medical legal partnership the most readily acceptable method of learning was live learning.
Suzette Melendez, Attorney and Legal Academic, Syracuse University College of Law:
[I]t’s a great way to teach and model – how to work with other disciplines … I’m convinced that the only way that we’re going to be able to tackle some of the issues that we see in our lower income population is going to be with a multi-faceted approach and it’s going to take an entire group of professionals to try to address it together.
Jocelyne Kravitz, Legal Student Volunteer, Rhode Island Center for Law and Public Policy:
In the US there’s a big criticism … that law schools aren’t actually teaching law students how to be lawyers, just learning theory and I think that a program like the MLP is exactly the kind of program for a law student where we actually learn what it means to be a lawyer working in this sort of field because we were presented with … the vast array of the issues that our clients would present to us and so we would have to decide, put ourselves in the shoes of the attorney and decide how it would work.
I can’t tell you how many of my friends in law school are terrified of graduating – they don’t even know what they’re going to do, they don’t know how to be a lawyer but I feel like because I did this experience I know, I have a bigger sense of what that means, particularly in working directly with the clients.
Randye Retkin, Attorney and Director of LegalHealth – New York Legal Assistance Group:
We have a clinic with NYU law school that’s ongoing. We have law students who participate in our summer program fight to work here. I mean literally we have such a competitive process. Law students … love the fact that they are connected to doctors and they’re not just sitting in a law office, but they’re out in the field and they get to meet another discipline and work with another discipline…
Liz Tobin Tyler, Attorney and Legal Academic, Roger Williams University School of Law:
I just met with a medical student yesterday who … was talking about welfare cases … around child abuse and neglect and how that’s handled in the hospital and had some issues and concerns about that and she said ‘Nobody ever talked to us, has never talked to us in medical school about manda- tory reporting of child abuse, the standard for it, how we think about it, what’s the consequence of reporting a family for suspected child abuse or neglect.’ That’s a problem in their medical educa- tion so … my goal along with legal education is that we need to be integrating this stuff much more in the medical school curriculum because even if they’re not doing MLP work there’s a lot of these issues that they need to understand.
QUESTION 10:
The Australian and US healthcare systems are markedly different and have different pressures. To the extent that you are able to comment:
a) To what extent do the unique characteristics of the health (or legal systems) contribute to poor health, rather than other social or biological factors?