Ballard A1, Weekes J, Bozin D, de Prazer V
1Citizen Centred Justice, 2University of Canberra Medical & Counselling Centre, 3Canberra Law School, University of Canberra, 4Adjacent Law & Health
Biography:
Allison is a socio-legal academic and lawyer who practices in the areas of employment, administrative law, workplace bullying, harassment, discrimination, human rights, and work health and safety. She has worked in private legal practice and across the community legal, legal aid, government, union, and industrial sectors. Allison is a committee member of the ACT Law Society’s Employment Law Committee and the Australian Labour & Employment Relations Association (ACT Chapter). Her research interests include workplace violence, bullying and harassment, and clinical legal education.
Social prescribing is a term we use to reflect prescribing ‘social change’ rather than just simply giving a script for medication. Do we address patient distress/depression with antidepressants or sleeping ills only or should we try and address the sometimes very complex issues that patients face in a multi-disciplinary way to find better solutions? Just like we can prescribe exercise for health and well-being, here we are aiming to shift a difficult or critical situation that a patient faces by working with other professionals to offer alternative solutions that also offer the chance to provide significant health benefits and improve patient health and well-being. Rather than waiting for a crisis to unfold, we (the patient/client, the health professionals and the legal professionals) work together to help the patients make more informed choices. What might seem obvious to a lawyer in relation to process and referral in the legal system may be very different from what the individual or the health professional perceives. Time spent working out the different options patients might have from a legal perspective can save a lot of time used in counselling people and addressing their fears, whether rational or irrational. It can save a lot of hours in the legal system too. With the Citiizen Centred Justice (CCJ) clinic, a health-justice clinic which operates under the University of Canberra Medical and Counselling Centre, an interdisciplinary team of law academics and legal and health professionals (general practitioners, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc) work together to ensure patients are better informed about their legal and other options and to work together towards achieving positive social and health changes, while providing access to justice to vulnerable people. We think that if Australian medical practices embedded a lawyer/s into their team there would be greater access to justice.