Health Justice Interventions in England and Australia: An Intersectional Approach to Legal Capability and Health Literacy

Scholarship to date has evidenced a clear relationship between poor health and unmet legal need, particularly among disadvantaged and marginalised social groups. This has inspired a range of new service initiatives around the world which seek to target legal and health interventions at marginalised groups in a concerted way, either through co-located services or through strong referral relationships between support services. In this article, we draw upon comparative insights from England and Australia to argue that, despite the success of such initiatives in England to date, there remain a range of overlooked early intervention opportunities for addressing the cumulative and compounding ways that legal and health problems intersect at the individual level. To do so, we map the current landscape of scholarly evidence regarding the relationship between health and justice and introduce a conceptual framework of intersectionality as reinforced by vulnerability theory as a fresh lens through which to explore the diverse ways that individualised experiences of health and legal problems intersect with wider marginalisation. Employing this lens, we draw out key insights across these two jurisdictions and assert that England has much to learn from the ‘bottom-up’ approach to service design in Australia. Specifically, we argue that health justice interventions must be better matched to the individualised needs of service users, and that with stronger understanding of how individuals experience and respond to health and/or legal problems, it will be possible to diversify interventions to a broader range of settings, from primary care, to emergency healthcare, to community services. To aid this understanding, we propose that future development and evaluation of such initiatives must be clearly focussed on ensuring that services are three things: responsive, holistic, and community-embedded.