Mission and History

Mission

Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston aims to improve the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations in Massachusetts through medical-legal partnership, a healthcare delivery model that integrates legal assistance as a core component of patient care. Our mission reflects the vision of Boston Medical Center, the leading hospital provider of medical care and services to Boston’s low-income families, and the Boston University School of Medicine.

1993-2009

With origins in the early vision of Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School leaders Gary Bellow and JudyAnn Bigby, MLP | Boston was founded at New England’s largest safety net hospital, Boston City Hospital (later renamed Boston Medical Center, or BMC). Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Chief of Pediatrics at BMC, grew frustrated by watching his young patients fail to make clinical progress as a result of substandard housing, food insecurity, and other social determinants of health. Dr. Zuckerman hired a part-time attorney (supplied by Greater Boston Legal Services) directly into the Pediatrics Department to address his patients’ unmet needs for housing, food, and safety.

Over the next 12 years, this program (initially called the Family Advocacy Program) evolved into a team of multiple lawyers, paralegals, and pediatricians; by 2005, the team was serving hundreds of patient-families annually both at BMC and at 3 BMC-affiliated community health centers. Following a 2001 New York Times article about the program, then-Executive Director Ellen Lawton and then-Medical Director Lauren Smith found themselves informally providing technical assistance to scores of health care institutions and legal aid programs around the country who were hungry to establish medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in their communities.

In early 2006, the Kellogg and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations recognized the transformative potential of MLPs for health care delivery in vulnerable patient populations and the significant appetite for technical assistance conveyed by communities across the country. These foundations invested in the formalization of a national arm of the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children (MLPC) and provided critical infrastructure to support the cultivation of the MLP model outside of Boston and beyond the field of pediatrics. With the support of generous funders in Massachusetts, MLPC’s local program continued to grow as well; by the end of 2008, the local program consisted of 10 legal staff members along with several consulting pediatricians and researchers.

In January 2009, MLPC recognized the dramatic and fast-paced evolution of the MLP landscape, the far reach of MLPs into vulnerable adult populations, and a need to better distinguish between the missions and activities of the local program, the national program, and the national network. Consequently, MLPC was bifurcated into 2 newly named programs: The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership (NCMLP) and Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston (MLP | Boston).

Today, both NCMLP and MLP | Boston are distinct Special Programs within the Department of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine.

MLP | Boston Today

With support from private law firms and in-house partners, MLP | Boston serves multiple health care departments within Boston Medical Center, the Primary Care Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, and 6 BMC-affiliated health centers treating low-income patients in Greater Boston.

MLP | Boston is the Founding Site of the national MLP Network, a network of over 80 medical-legal partnerships across the country, partnered with 200+ health care institutions. In addition to regular contributions to national conferences, publications, and other such technical assistance activities, MLP | Boston actively supports the growing community of MLPs that serve patients in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and greater New England.