DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Now, here are two professions that have traditionally had a rocky relationship - doctors and lawyers. But they're finding some common ground in hundreds of clinics and hospitals across the country.

Jeff St. Clair of member station WKSU reports on a study being carried out in Akron, Ohio. It looks at how adding a lawyer to a medical clinic team can help improve patient care.

JEFF ST. CLAIR, BYLINE: As a TV drones in the background, about a dozen women and children wait for their names to be called at the Summa Women's Clinic in Akron.

(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHATTER)

CLAIR: In the clinic's conference room, Meredith Watts is awaiting her next case. She's not a doctor, or a nurse - she's a lawyer.

MEREDITH WATTS: I specialize in housing, and in some consumer work.

CLAIR: Watts works for Community Legal Aid, a non-profit that gives free legal help to low-income people in eight Ohio counties. Her firm is housed in a downtown office tower, but Watts prefers working out of here.

WATTS: So if somebody comes into the clinic and they get sent to me, and it's a housing problem and I'm here, I can give them advice directly on site.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Meredith Watts' role on the team is to help solve issues that might affect a patient's health but are outside a doctor's control.

WATTS: And let's say you're under threat of eviction because of something that happened, that's going to cause a significant amount of anxiety potentially, and then you're suffering from these anxiety problems that wouldn't have happened if we had been able to intervene and perhaps, help with the eviction problem.

CLAIR: And, as a lawyer, Watts makes house calls.

(LAUGHTER)

CLAIR: We meet client Shirley Kimbrough at her subsidized housing unit in a north Akron neighborhood.

SHIRLEY KIMBROUGH: (Unintelligible).

WATTS: OK.

CLAIR: The clinic referred Kimbrough to Watts, who last year helped her move into this handicapped accessible apartment to care for her disabled granddaughter.

KIMBROUGH: If I hadn't had her to help me, I would have lost my granddaughter, because I had already lost my daughter, and I don't think I could have stood that.

WATTS: Attorney Marie Curry runs Akron's medical-legal partnership. Rather than chasing ambulances, she tries to keep vulnerable clients out of them.

MARIE CURRY: It's exciting to be able to do what we think of as preventative law, rather than always being crisis intervention, because you can help something not happen, before it becomes a crisis.

CLAIR: But not all lawyers are quick to embrace a cozy new relationship with their old adversaries.

ALLEN SCHULMAN: I don't understand how a medical clinic needs an attorney to be a part of its team. It doesn't make any sense to me.

CLAIR: Allen Schulman is a malpractice attorney in nearby Canton, who takes a more traditional view of the two professions.

SCHULMAN: I think there has historically been an animosity between lawyers and doctors. I think we share some of the blame, and I think the medical profession shares some of the blame.

MICHELE MCCARROLL: Thank you, Phil.

CLAIR: But back at the Akron women's clinic, physician Michele McCarroll likes having a lawyer down the hall from her examination room.

MCCARROLL: In the sense that we are trying to meet the needs of the patients right here on site in a, sort of, one stop shop, where we know things that make a difference such as social issues can make a difference in health issues.

CLAIR: McCarroll and Akron's Community Legal Aid lawyers have enrolled 100 women in the first randomized study to determine whether having a lawyer on-site really does improve health outcomes.

They're measuring things like blood pressure, stress, and other health factors in two groups of women who had legal issues. One group was introduced to a clinic lawyer, the other group was given a number for the legal help line.

They'll present their results next week at the Medical-Legal Partnership Summit in Washington.

For NPR News, I'm Jeff St. Clair. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.