Loyola launches Maywood Medical-Legal Partnership

Initiative tackles health-harming legal needs of underserved populations

Loyola’s Maywood Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP), which supports underserved populations, launched on February 1, 2021. Through this interdisciplinary partnership between Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s Health Justice Project, Loyola Medicine, and Stritch School of Medicine, the Maywood MLP serves patients of the Loyola Center for Health on Roosevelt in Maywood, Illinois, by collaborating with clinic providers and staff to address the health-harming legal needs of vulnerable patients and advocating for policies that combat systemic barriers to health.

“We are so excited to collaborate with the providers and staff at the Center for Health on Roosevelt to address the legal needs of vulnerable patients,” says Maya K. Watson, acting director of the Maywood MLP. “In light of the dismal rise of evictions and unemployment rates and the profound health inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, the Maywood Medical-Legal Partnership is ready to serve the legal needs of the Center’s most vulnerable patients while advocating for policies toward achieving health equity for all.”

The COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable populations has exposed structural inequities in the distribution of resources and access to health care in unprecedented ways. In addition to the Maywood MLP work, faculty and students in Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s Health Justice Project clinic and in Loyola’s schools of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine have responded with outreach and services targeted at communities underrepresented in the allocation of resources yet overrepresented by COVID-19 cases and its financial and health consequences.

For more on Loyola’s outreach work during the pandemic, see the October 2020 article Loyola’s Health Justice Project tackles health inequities and COVID-19.