10-Year Spotlight: Pinellas County Medical Legal Partnership
A Decade of Making a Difference
In 2018, the Foundation awarded a transformative grant of just more than $1 million to fund a unique collaboration designed to improve patient health and outcomes by connecting medical and legal services. The Pinellas County Medical-Legal Partnership Project worked to integrate legal professionals into a health care setting at what is now Evara Health’s Johnnie Ruth Clarke Center. This partnership empowered care teams to identify health-harming civil legal needs and connect patients with free legal services through Bay Area Legal Services, Gulfcoast Legal Services, and Stetson University College of law.
“Medical-legal partnerships ask healthcare providers to pay attention to patterns and issues that might be beyond the scope of the assistance they normally provide, whether it’s a child who is continually missing doctor’s appointments, a student with accommodations that aren’t met, or someone with recurring medical issues that might be the result of substandard housing,” Bay Area Legal Services Managing Attorney Pye Young explained. “With a patient’s informed consent, that provider can then connect patients with us through a warm referral and we can take it from there.”
Through the partnership, attorneys helped ensure accommodations were honored, resolved landlord-tenant issues, prevented evictions, and even intervened in custody issues.
“When you have someone in crisis, they can really benefit from a warm referral between parties, which cuts down on red tape that people have to cut through to get their needs met,” Young said. “The medical-legal partnership is really a lodestar of collaboration models.”
Grant Awarded: $1,040,967 (multi-year)