The Center for Children’s Advocacy (CCA) and Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) joined forces in November 2020 to open a first of its kind Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) office on site at YCSC. The program has had a powerful impact on patients and providers and continues to enhance children’s behavioral health care across the health system as it seeks to address the health-harming legal needs of YCSC patients and families.
The partnership is the first children's behavioral health MLP in the country. CCA attorney Kathryn Meyer works with YCSC clinicians to provide direct legal support to improve health equity and outcomes relating to mental health issues, educational support, and benefits for children in the New Haven region. She provides critical legal interventions for children suffering from family trauma and health-harming environmental stressors gravely impacting children’s lives and disproportionately affecting children of color.
The MLP provides unique behavioral-health related education and training opportunities to pediatric providers and behavioral health clinicians throughout Connecticut. Such legal support helps YCSC clinicians meet families’ needs in a more comprehensive way, bringing the disciplines together to learn from one another and better raise public awareness about the mental and behavioral health needs of children, adolescents, and their families.
Born and raised in Connecticut, Attorney Meyer joined the Center for Children’s Advocacy in 2009 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and has co-counseled systemic and legislative efforts including statewide complaints, Office of Civil Rights complaints, and legislation concerning the education of vulnerable children. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School. “Children suffer from access issues that can be alleviated with our help,” said Meyer. “Our office at Yale Child Study Center brings legal advocacy and support directly to families who need help to secure services that can relieve enormous emotional, educational, and environmental stressors.”
Our office at Yale Child Study Center brings legal advocacy and support directly to families who need help to secure services that can relieve enormous emotional, educational, and environmental stressors.
Attorney Kathryn Meyer
A few highlights of the work of the YCSC MLP project included in the first annual report in November 2021 include the following.
- Patient Advocacy: over 80 professional consultations and 20 family consultations provided (short and ongoing advice cases), and 20 new cases for full representation. These consults and cases have included legal issues around education, housing, immigration, family law, domestic violence, LGBTQ rights, and Supplemental Security Income benefits, and more.
- Education and Training: Eight presentations to outpatient clinicians, psychology fellows, psychiatry fellows, and other providers. These trainings encompassed a range of topics, starting with education law (with a focus on special education and school discipline), and including the rights of LGBTQ youth, and teen legal rights (access to healthcare, confidentiality, etc.).
- Webinars: presented, moderated, and hosted multiple webinars on the topics of COVID-19 educational advocacy and other supports during the crisis (see Educational Rights in the Time of COVID - Center for Children's Advocacy at www.cca-ct.org for more).