WORKING TOGETHER TO ACHEIVE HEALTH EQUITY
“We all have a role to play in pursuing health equity, and there are many promising, collaborative, even trans-disciplinary approaches underway that participants can get involved in”, says Samantha Morton, Executive Director of Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston.
Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston, an Honoring Choices Collaborating Member, is an interdisciplinary team of health care staff, attorneys, and paralegals who integrate legal assistance into the medical setting as a vital component of patient care. They combine the strengths of law and medicine to effectively address the complex social determinants of patients’ health, and ensures that low-income patients are able to meet their basic needs for food, housing and utilities, education and employment, health care, and personal and family stability and safety.
“The national discussion about healthcare reform has triggered deep thinking and new approaches to the delivery of healthcare, especially to lower-income, medically vulnerable people who experience health disparities in a range of contexts”, says Ms. Morton. “As the dialogue moves from “treating illness” to “promoting health,” the historical boundaries between medicine, public health, and social services are increasingly — and, many would argue, productively – blurred.”
To bring these issues to the forefront, Medical-Legal Partnership is hosting their 5th Annual Conference, “Social Determinants of Health: Emerging Strategies for an Evolving Healthcare System” , on October 28, 2014, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “This conference will bring together innovators in a range of key domains – including but not limited to the substance abuse treatment community, the dual eligibles care community, and the community health worker network – to share lessons learned and best practices from current pilots that integrate responses to physical, behavioral, and social health.”
Multi-level engagement is a key theme of the conference to be explored in three interrelated “tracks”:
- Patients are People: Strategies that involve active health equity alliances between community members and healthcare delivery teams;
- Providers are Advocates: Strategies that build role-appropriate advocacy capacity in clinicians and allied healthcare workers;
- Institutions are Change Agents: Strategies that engage healthcare institution leadership in systems-level health equity initiatives.
The conference is a unique opportunity for all health care champions and community members alike to come together and learn effective strategies to address heath care inequities in Massachusetts. The conference welcomes healthcare team members, administrators, and researchers, community members, lawyers and advocates, public health workers, students – anyone invested in achieving health equity.
[This event is no longer current]