Podcast highlights collaboration of Kaiser Permanente and the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership on the “next phase” of the movement
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WASHINGTON – A new podcast explores the movement to connect health and justice through medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), including Kaiser Permanente’s investment in scaling this approach and improving housing stability.
Bethany Hamiliton, the Director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, and Elizabeth Trombley, Senior Director of Community Health at Kaiser Permanente, joined Legal Services Corporation (LSC) President Ron Flagg for a new episode of Talk Justice, “The Next Phase of the Medical-Legal Partnership Movement.”
The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, which is based at The George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. MLPs can take various forms, but the root of the approach is bringing attorneys into healthcare settings so that patients’ health-impacting legal problems can be addressed.
“What MLP does is it actually gives healthcare teams that mechanism for moving from just identifying a problem to actually being able to do something about it,” said Hamilton.
Trombley highlighted the story of one patient, a woman named Isabella who was undergoing treatment for lung cancer at Los Angeles Medical Center. Isabella shared with her social worker that she had been notified that her landlord was raising her rent by $500 a month, which she could not afford. She feared she would be living in her car within a few weeks.
The social worker referred her to the MLP staff attorney from Neighborhood Legal Services of LA County, who was able to assist Isabella with a response to her landlord and help her understand her rights as a tenant. As a result, she remained housed in her apartment with a rent she could afford.
“I share that story to paint the picture of just how truly life-changing these MLP resources are,” Trombley said. “[Also] for the staff caring for Isabella, the impact on them to have resources like this is just tremendous... Our social worker who referred Isabella to our MLP spoke so eloquently about how having these legal services situated inside her clinic just extends her ability to serve our patients.”
Hamiliton agreed about the impact of MLPs on healthcare staff, explaining that one doctor told her that after working with an MLP, she never wanted to practice medicine without one again.
Hamilton explained that the early years of the National Center’s work were focused on replication. When the National Center was created in 2006, there were 31 MLPs across the country. Now, it’s estimated that there are about 500 MLPs operating in the U.S., and many others abroad.
After replication, the focus became sustainability by building the evidence base to show the benefits of MLPs and securing institutional investment. Now, Hamilton explained, the next phase of the movement will focus on system change and building new partnerships with the willingness to rethink how the legal and healthcare systems can work together.
“From 2026 forward, we're really looking at systems transformation and we're asking some bigger questions here,” Hamilton said. “[We’re] really looking at what we learned over 20 years of our work at the National Center – and many more decades of work that the movement has been carrying out – and using that to figure out how to transform the very systems that people, communities, the federal government, state and local governments rely on to actually effectuate change and improvements in health as well as justice.”
Hamilton said that she is encouraged by seeing health systems and public agencies make significant investments in legal services and the infrastructure that supports them.
In 2021, Kaiser Permanente made a systemwide investment in MLPs to better address housing insecurity for its patients and communities. The National Center provides technical assistance on the project.
One in seven Kaiser Permanente members report having unstable housing, Trombley explained, adding that the average life expectancy for a person who was unhoused is 27 years shorter than that of a housed person.
“So, for us at Kaiser Permanente, housing really is health and we believe everyone across the nation deserves to have a safe and stable place to call home,” said Trombley.
“It shows up in our system,” she continued. “When people are housing insecure, we see higher rates of emergency department visits, we see longer hospital stays, we see avoidable readmission rates, poorer chronic disease management, and really truly widening health disparities.”
Kaiser Permanente is partnering directly with six legal aid organizations to run MLPs at select clinics across the country, while also providing 22 legal services organizations with grant funding and technical assistance to expand their capacity to build MLPs that serve communities beyond Kaiser Permanente patients.
“The goal of Kaiser Permanente's medical-legal partnership initiative is to, on the first hand, reduce and prevent evictions, to increase housing stability, and to improve health outcomes by embedding MLPs across the healthcare system, as well as strengthening the broader legal aid community,” Trombley said.
To hear the rest of this conversation, listen to the full episode of Talk Justice online, on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s Leaders Council.