Medicine and Law Partner for Patients
Dana Weintraub, MD, fellow ‘04, saw that many low-income children need not just health care but also legal remedies, inspiring her to become a national advocate for a medical-legal model of patient care. She realized that parents frequently confide to pediatricians details about their children’s home and school lives, putting the physician in a unique position to spot legal problems in areas such as substandard housing and educational inequities.
Her students get streetwise quickly in Weintraub’s class, Medical-Legal Issues in Children’s Health. They wrestle with cockroaches, poverty, and child abuse. They immerse themselves in tenants’ rights, welfare benefits, and immigration law.
In short, they learn about legal solutions for problems that ail many low-income patients and how they, as future doctors, can prescribe them. “We’re bringing lawyers and doctors together toward the common goal of improving children’s health,” said Weintraub, a general pediatrics fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine from 2002 to 2004.
Now in its third year, the class attracts medical and law students and is co-taught at Stanford Law School by Weintraub and Melissa Rodgers of the UC Berkeley School of Law. It grew out of the pair’s collaboration on the Peninsula Family Advocacy Program, an initiative they launched in 2004, in which pediatricians refer patients to lawyers who provide help in addressing underlying causes of poor health in low-income children.
Lawyers have secured improved housing for young patients living with cockroaches, mold, rats, unsafe electricity, missing windows, and plumbing problems. They’ve helped parents navigate the world of special education and obtain government benefits. The Family Advocacy Program is a collaboration of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, East Palo Alto’s Ravenswood Family Health Center, and the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County.
“Dana truly cares for these families,” said Brooke Heymach, legal director. “In her passion for her work she tries to get kids everything they need, whether it’s safe housing, public benefits, or special education services.”
Weintraub, an assistant professor in general pediatrics at the School of Medicine and at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, has become a leader in the National Center for Medical Legal Partnership, founded in 2006 by Barry Zuckerman, MD, at Boston Medical Center. As one of six assistant medical directors for the organization, she is working to support and evaluate some 120 similar ventures around the country, in addition to her work closer to home.