PROFESSOR MEDHA MAKHLOUF ATTENDED CONVENING ON COMMUNITY HEALTH IN PERU
September 2024 — Professor Medha D. Makhlouf was selected to attend a Convening on Community Health hosted by the Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity (AFHE), from September 9-13, in Lima, Peru. The Convening hosted twenty Senior Fellows whose work focuses on the role of Community Health Workers (CHWs) in improving the health of communities.
The goal of the Convening was to “explore the nexus between societal, political, and economic factors that affect healthcare delivery in Lima” through firsthand observation of community-based health programs and collaborative activities. The local organization that co-hosted the Convening was Partners in Health, a global health organization that seeks to bring excellent health care to the most vulnerable communities in the world. The organization is known as Socios en Salud (SES) in Peru. Lima was selected as the Convening location because of SES’s impressive community-focused initiatives in improving maternal and child health, tuberculosis, mental health, and noncommunicable diseases.
During the Convening, participants received training on using participatory planning approaches to build grass-roots movements; learned about the Peruvian public health and health care systems; and spent two days learning from CHWs and other SES staff at various sites in Carabayllo, an outlying district of Lima where access to electricity and water is limited, and poverty rates are among the highest in the region.
Professor Makhlouf has worked closely with CHWs for more than ten years in medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), including in the MLP Clinic, which she founded at Penn State Dickinson Law in 2016. She states, “CHWs have been critical to the success of MLPs. They come from the communities served by our healthcare partners and therefore have expert, invaluable knowledge about the social context of patients’ lives. They are typically the best-equipped staff to identify patients’ unmet, health-harming legal needs before they become legal and health crises; indeed, nearly all the cases handled by the MLPs where I have worked were referred by CHWs. My students at the law school have also had the benefit of receiving wisdom from CHWs on topics such as self-care, vicarious trauma, working with interpreters, and building relationships with community organizations.”
Professor Makhlouf applied to attend the Convening to learn new ways to collaborate with CHWs in her work with the MLP Clinic. She also sought to share information with SES staff and Convening participants about MLPs, including how they are organized, how they benefit patients’ health, and how they are typically funded. Over the long term, she aims to build relationships with law schools, health care providers, and NGOs who may be interested in establishing MLPs across the region.
Professor Medha D. Makhlouf is the Elsie de R. and Samuel P. Orlando Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Medical-Legal Partnership Clinic at Penn State Dickinson Law. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at Penn State College of Medicine. Professor Makhlouf’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of health law, immigrants’ rights, and poverty law and policy. Her recent scholarship has been published in the New York University Law Review, the California Law Review Online, and the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law & Ethics. Professor Makhlouf’s work is available at https://works.bepress.com/medha-makhlouf/. She is on sabbatical during the 2024-25 academic year, and is working on a book project tentatively titled “Health Justice for Migrants: Constructing an Inclusionary Legal System.”