The last decade has seen a rise in the number of legal, health and other practitioners in Australia coming together in partnership to address the unmet legal needs that affect the health and wellbeing of shared patients and clients. One of the ways this occurs is through health justice partnership. Health justice partnerships (HJPs) are collaborations that embed legal help into healthcare settings to address the legal and social problems that can make or keep people unwell. This quiet revolution in collaborative service delivery is connecting people with the legal help they need in the places that they already turn to. Working in such health justice partnerships involves practitioners communicating and collaborating across multiple domains – including setting up processes, establishing mutual trust and ways of working, and sharing insights, expertise and information with each other.

This discussion paper explores secondary consultation as an activity that practitioners have identified as a valuable tool for working in health justice partnership. The term secondary consultation refers to communication and information sharing between partnering practitioners that helps them to support their patients and clients. In this paper we share what we have learned so far about the activity, exploring its definition, value and impact in practice. We seek to continue the conversation about ways to capture the extent and nature of secondary consultations in data, and the value of this data for articulating and beginning to measure impact.

The paper is broken into four parts:

1. Secondary consultation – what is it?
2. The benefits and challenges for practitioners and their patients and clients.
3. Capturing data and measuring impact.
4. Next steps – where to from here?