Creating Gladys: How Legal Design Can Support Person-Centred Care in Public Health

This paper offers a novel and complex context in which to consider legal design’s potential. Public healthcare presents the confluence of several multidisciplinary strands of human-centric practice, along with the spectre of limited budgets and expenditure of public funds. It sets out a case study considering the legal process by which consumers in Victoria, Australia can access medical records held by a public health service. This paper argues that legal design can support consumer health literacy, in turn promoting an empowered model of health in person-centred care. The paper offers a contribution to the wider legal design discourse, suggesting that legal design can reduce barriers in legal processes within the health literacy environment of public health. Legal design has clear alignment with Australian health literacy strategy: legal design techniques offer a means by which legal processes in health can align more broadly with person-centred care. This paper also suggests that legal design can contribute to the realisation of healthcare rights, through careful resource allocation and the tailoring of design methodologies and techniques. In the post-covid world, public health in Victoria is experiencing significant budgetary strain. Tight budgets place restrictions on the planning and delivery of legal design projects. However, legal design does not need to be expensive, and the case study in this paper confirms that great results, and substantial impact, can be achieved on a shoestring. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, it considers the links and alignments between public health and legal design methodologies and practice. It shows the opportunities for legal design in the promotion of health literacy and person-centred care at a theoretical level. Part two sets out a detailed case study, demonstrating legal design methods applied in the context of consumer access to medical records under the Victorian Freedom of Information (FOI) regime. Part three draws together key reflections on the case study, confirming the efficacy of legal design methodologies and techniques, and situating these within the paradigm of person-centred care.