Health care is undermined when patients don't receive the benefit of laws intended to address social determinants of health, such as housing and food. Medical-legal partnerships, which now exist in more than 200 clinical sites in the United States, integrate lawyers into health care to address legal problems that create and perpetuate poor health. This paper describes how such medical-legal partnerships can change clinical systems-for example, by adding legal form letters to electronic health records to help low-income patients rectify substandard housing conditions. We recommend the integration of medical-legal partnerships into federal health care programs.

Medical-legal partnerships combine the skill sets of medical professionals and lawyers to teach social determinants of health by training residents and attending physicians to identify and help address unmet legal needs. Medical-legal partnership doctors and lawyers treat health disparities and improve patient health and well-being by ensuring that public programs, regulations, and laws created to benefit health and improve access to health care are implemented and enforced.

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) embed civil legal services lawyers into health care settings and interprofessional health care teams delivering care to low-income or otherwise vulnerable patients and communities. MLPs present the opportunity to instill in residents a practical understanding of the social determinants of health and provide them with concrete tools to address them. MLP training helps residents develop structural competency and build the skills necessary to address barriers to health at the patient, institutional, and population levels. Through a case study, this Perspective explores how residents can address health-harming legal needs working in partnership with interprofessional health care teams that include lawyers, and illustrates how such MLP experiences can relate to competency-based Milestones that are applicable to training residents in all specialties.

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