Public Health and Nursing

For up to 75% of the problems effecting people’s health, the solutions sit beyond the health system. Problems like poor quality housing effecting a person’s respiratory health, credit or debt issues exacerbating stress and anxiety, and violence in the home are all exaamples of everyday problems that effect people’s health but may not be resolved by healthcare alone. Health services have become very good at recognising the impact these problems have on people’s health, but they don’t always have the tools to address them. 

Health justice partnership is a service collaboration that is changing that. By embedding legal help into healthcare teams and settings to tackle the impact of legal problems on health and wellbeing, this approach demonstrates how we can build the capability to identify and respond to non-medical problems through the healthcare settings that people know and trust. Through this approach, new alliances are also emerging in relation to policy and system-level improvements to public health across a range of areas.

This keynote will argue for the inclusion of legal institutions and legal assistance services within our understanding of the social deteminants of health, as key mechanisms to improve family healt and wellbeing. It will then present a series of case studies from hospital, primary health and child and maternal health settings to demonstrate the impact of embedding legal help into healthcare teams and settings and the evidence of systemic change that is emerging from the international movement for health justice partnership.