Health+Law’s recent Legal Needs Study (LeNS), which involved more than 140 in-depth interviews and a survey of over 1000 participants, documented the everyday experiences of law among people living with HIV and hepatitis B across Australia. Among other things, this included what people think makes a ‘good lawyer’ or a ‘good migration agent’, particularly when legal issues emerge that are related to – or made more complex by – the experience of living with a blood-borne virus.

People are far more likely to see a healthcare worker than a lawyer. Community nurses, GPs and other kinds of professionals in the primary healthcare workforce are also often a trusted, familiar or regular point of contact, offering people a place where they feel safe to raise problems, including – potentially – legal ones. This places healthcare workers in a unique position to recognise when a problem may have a legal dimension, and to guide their patients toward information or support.

The Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (SAANZ) holds an annual conference in different parts of the country to discuss key issues in sociology, both local and international. Perhaps for obvious reasons, these often focus on current and emerging crises – the environmental, geopolitical, welfare and other ‘wicked problems’ of our time. Such crises are so often the bread and butter of academic sociological research, a ‘crisis science’ with subjects ‘emerging from and responding to profound modern social transformations’, as SAANZ describes it.

Health+Law’s mission requires more than legal expertise alone. It requires people who can move between the broader evidence base – to understand what’s happening to people affected by HIV and hepatitis B – and the legal and policy mechanisms that produce those outcomes.
Daniel Storer is a member of the team who brings these capabilities together to understand how law produces health effects for people living with a blood-borne virus in Australia. He brings valuable insights into policy, community partnerships and collaborative projects from several years’ work in the HIV sector, and he honed his qualitative social research skills with a PhD in the School of Population Health at UNSW.

At times, HIV disclosure is complicated legal terrain. Although all Australian states and territories differ in their approaches, most now apply a ‘reasonable precautions’ framework rather than requiring people living with HIV to disclose their status in every circumstance. And yet, uncertainties remain. How, for example, does U=U operate in relation to a ‘reasonable precautions’ model? Can PrEP use be considered a ‘reasonable precaution’ under law? What constitutes due diligence when medical and scientific understandings have advanced more rapidly than legal interpretation?

Hepatitis B is Australia’s most prevalent blood-borne virus, with nearly 220,000 people estimated to be living with chronic infection. In a recent report called ‘If Hepatitis was 100 People’, Hepatitis Australia spotlit the radical diversity of this population. It includes a high concentration of people who were born overseas (about 70%), typically in parts of the world with higher hepatitis B prevalence or where vaccination programs have historically been limited. Many of these people (about 56%) speak languages in addition to English in their homes. Around 7% are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, 4% are men who have sex with men, and 3% percent are people who inject drugs.  

Each year, LiverWELL  recognises individuals and organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to the lives of people living with viral hepatitis and liver disease. LiverWELL is Victoria’s peak organisation championing the interests of people affected by or at risk of viral hepatitis and liver disease. The Health+Law team were deeply honoured to be named as a co-winner of this year’s Organisational Collaboration Recognition Award at this year’s LiverWELL awards, which were held in Naarm/Melbourne in October. 

How do law and health intersect? Can healthcare and legal sectors genuinely collaborate to support vulnerable people facing interconnected health and legal problems? What does that look like in practice? These and other questions animated a recent event titled ‘Health Justice in Action: Research, Advocacy and Practice’ focused on why combining legal, health and community expertise matters.  

Early diagnosis and rapid initiation of treatment lead to better health outcomes for people living with HIV. Achieving these aims supports individual and population health – as both the early detection of HIV and the achievement of undetectable viral load through treatment uptake together support a reduction of HIV transmission in the community, potentially reducing it to zero. This means that access to HIV testing remains a central pillar of HIV health, especially for people and groups who may be at elevated risk of HIV acquisition.

Ika Yuni Wulansari joined the Health+Law team in 2024 to work on processing and analysing a huge amount of data from our national legal needs survey. She brings over 15 years’ experience as an applied statistician, including appointments at Statistics Indonesia and as Assistant Professor at Politeknik Statistika STIS, and is currently completing a PhD in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, UTS.

We caught up with Ika to chat about how these various research threads intersect, her work with Health+Law, and what makes her passionate about statistical methods.

‘Legal issues are a near-universal experience for people living with HIV’, said Associate Professor David Carter to an audience meeting on Kaurna Country in Adelaide last week. A significant majority of participants in Health+Law national research reported at least one legal problem. The study suggests that rates of legal issues among people living with HIV may be more than double the rate experienced by members of the general population in Australia, based on recent legal needs research from Victoria. 

Last month, over 400 researchers, healthcare workers, community members, policymakers and individual people with lived experience of viral hepatitis descended on Naarm/Melbourne for the 15^th Australasian Viral Hepatitis Conference. Under the banner of ‘Real People, Real Action, Real Results’, this year’s gathering focused on empowering community members in their roles as advocates and participants in efforts to eliminate viral hepatitis. Members of the Health+Law team were delighted to participate as conference delegates and to share brand new findings from our national legal needs study (LeNS).

Health+Law will soon launch the findings from our flagship project, LeNS, a national study of the legal experiences of people living with hepatitis B and people living with HIV. LeNS is the first study of its kind in Australia to comprehensively explore how people in those communities experience the law in their everyday lives.

Imagine uprooting your entire life to move to a new country. A process where you’ll be orienting to a new geography of landscapes, people and public amenities. At the same time, you might be seeking connections and finding supports in a place where you don’t have established family, friends and community. All while taking steps to navigate new rules and processes in a foreign system of education, health care, social services and more, perhaps while grappling with a new or second language.

This month on 28 July 2025 we mark World Hepatitis Day. This year’s theme, ‘It’s Time for Action', is an urgent reminder that more needs to be done if we are to reach Australia’s national hepatitis B and hepatitis C elimination targets by 2030.

Ahead of this year’s World Hepatitis Day, we have rounded up some highlights from our work on hepatitis B and the law and collaborations with our partners from over the past year.

The HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC) is Australia’s only specialist community legal centre dedicated to people with legal matters related to HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Based in Sydney, HALC has provided free legal services since 1992.

While HALC primarily supports individuals facing HIV- and hepatitis-related legal issues, its work extends far beyond casework. The Centre has a significant impact on policy, law reform, community legal awareness and education.

Bethany Rodgers, HALC’s Strategic Policy Lawyer, works across all of these areas. We spoke with Beth about her role and about the broader functions of a community legal centre dedicated to the needs of people living with blood-borne viruses.

Since 1992, the HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC) has been providing free legal services to people facing HIV- and hepatitis-related legal matters. HALC also plays a broader role in the constellation of community and health organisations that support and serve people living with blood-borne viruses, including as a source of legal information and education, and as a leading advocate for evidence-based law reform through advocacy and strategic litigation. As Australia’s first and only specialist community legal centre for people living with blood-borne viruses, HALC is central to ensuring that people in these communities receive access to justice.

Just as the parliament of South Australia looks to expand its existing mandatory disease testing scheme, a recent NSW Ombudsman’s report has questioned the effectiveness and suitability of a similar scheme in New South Wales.

The law has a powerful relationship to health. In the case of HIV, the way law is designed and enforced can have a huge impact on preventing HIV transmissions in populations, and ensuring people living with HIV can access the care and treatment they need.

For people affected by hepatitis B, the journey through the Australian visa and migration system can be stressful, uncertain and costly. The administrative processes demanded by the health requirement and mandatory health assessments for visa applicants add an extra layer of complexity. People living with hepatitis B going through this process are often left with more questions than answers, and very little publicly available information to guide them.