Spotlight: UC Hastings’ and UC San Francisco’s Medical-Legal Partnership for Seniors Clinic

Earlier this week, I wrote about a new publication drawing attention to “six” specific areas of need that can helped by a health/law partnership to provide more comprehensive services for the older client or patient.  That post inspired one of our regular readers to write about her experiences with an important Consortium effort between the law school at UC Hastings and the medical program at UC San Francisco.  Their Medical-Legal Partnership for Seniors Clinic (MLPS Clinic) sounds terrific and, not surprisingly, it attracted the attention of the New York Times from its inception:

Consider the geriatricians working at the Lakeside Senior Medical Center, an outpatient clinic at the University of California, San Francisco. Many of their patients, despite multiple chronic diseases and advanced age, have never filled out power-of-attorney documents or appointed someone to make health care decisions if they are unable to.

 

Sometimes, the doctors suspect their patients might qualify for public benefits they are not getting, like food stamps or MediCal, the state’s version of Medicaid. Perhaps they face problems with landlords or appear to be victims of financial abuse, or they ought to have a simple will.

 

In other words, they need lawyers. But trying to get frail, low-income seniors to consult an elder attorney can seem an insurmountable problem. How will they travel to a law office? Or pay a fee that can reach $300 an hour? Even if the doctors can refer them to a legal aid office, will their elderly patients actually make an appointment? Then remember to go?

 

At Lakeside there is a simpler solution, said Sarah Hooper, who teaches at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. “The physicians do the initial screenings, hear what their patients’ problems are, take the history — and they essentially write a prescription: ‘Go down the hall and see my friends at U.C. Hastings for help with this housing issue,’ ” she said.

Sarah Hooper, Executive Director for the clinic, provided an update, explaining, “We’ve done quite a bit of outreach within MLP and in the healthcare system, but are increasingly realizing that we need to get more elder law attorneys and legal aid advocates energized around this idea.”  Sarah reports that she’ll be attending and presenting at the National Aging and Law Conference in D.C. in October, 2016 and hopes to inspire others to develop similar partnerships.

For more on the UC Hastings-San Francisco MLPS Clinic, read the full New York Times article (first published in 2013) by Paula Spahn, “The Doctor’s New Prescription: A Lawyer.”   For more on the Medical-Legal Partnership concept, visit the website for the National Center for Medical Legal Partnerships.