Media Release: Clayton Utz Foundation launches $50,000 Health Justice Partnership award

The Clayton Utz Foundation is proud to announce a new $50,000 award to help advance the capacity of one of Australia's growing number of Health Justice Partnerships (HJPs).

The Clayton Utz Foundation Health Justice Partnership Award will be a $50,000 grant to support an existing HJP to further their work by building capacity, supporting the skills and capabilities of those working in the partnership, and/or progressing innovation in the HJP sector.

The Foundation has established the Award in consultation with Health Justice Australia to recognise the ongoing need for financial support to continue the growth of the HJP landscape.

Over the past 10 years the Clayton Utz Foundation has granted over $1 million in funding to help embed the model of HJPs in Australia, transforming the way the most vulnerable people in our community access legal services.

HJPs aim to create better health outcomes and improved access to justice by delivering community legal services to patients within the health system. They use healthcare professionals to identify when a patient has potential legal problems and to link them with a lawyer onsite, meaning that earlier legal intervention can prevent health and legal issues from escalating. There are now over 100 HJPs operating in Australia.

Clayton Utz Foundation chair Marcus Davenport said the growth of the HJP sector to date showed that the model of co-locating health and legal services was translating into tangible positive outcomes.

HJPs make absolute sense, and we're proud to have helped lay the foundations for HJPs to be embraced as a new way of delivering health and legal services. 

In 2015, Clayton Utz Foundation provided founding support for Health Justice Australia, a national centre of excellence supporting Health Justice Partnerships. This funding marked the milestone of providing 500,000 hours of pro bono legal work since our Pro Bono practice was launched in 1997.

The Clayton Utz Foundation has played a key role since 2011 in nurturing the HJP movement, including funding an HJP with Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre and Bendigo Community Health Services. The creation of a national centre was a recommendation made by Clayton Utz Foundation Fellow Peter Noble in his August 2012 report to the Foundation "Advocacy-Health Alliances: Better Health Through Medical-Legal Partnerships".  

Since 2003, the Clayton Utz Foundation has made over $12.9 million in grants to more than 280 charities.