Looking back over the network's first year, founder Scientia Professor Carla Treloar and Communications Lead Brooke Nolan reflect on what a year of conversations has revealed about tackling stigma in healthcare.

Should people disclose a mental illness at work? To family? Friends? Healthcare professionals? For many people, there isn't a simple answer. This month's featured research evaluated Honest, Open, Proud (HOP), a peer-led program developed by leading stigma researcher Professor Patrick Corrigan to help people make informed decisions about whether, when and how to disclose a mental illness.

Over more than two decades, Dr. Laura Nyblade has helped shape the global understanding of stigma, developing measurement tools, designing and testing interventions, pioneering the Total Facility Approach, and most recently embedding stigma reduction into the training of future healthcare workers in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia.

Six years ago, Louise Maher realised her team couldn't tackle stigma alone. Today, that conversation has grown into a district-wide inclusion initiative spanning multiple services across an entire local health district.

What if healthcare stopped trying to identify who might experience stigma and instead assumed everyone could? That's the idea behind a study led by the Tackling Stigma in Healthcare team at the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydney. Watch the video and read the key takeaways here.

Australia’s first inquiry into women’s pain, was designed to respond to what has been described as the “gender pain gap”, the growing recognition that women’s pain is not taken as seriously, or managed as effectively, as men’s. At the heart of it all? Structural stigma. Here, we delve into the results of the inquiry.

Stigma in healthcare is often treated as an individual problem - something that happens in moments between people. But for Dr Javeed Sukhera, that framing misses where much of the harm sits. Here, we discuss structural stigma and what can be done to combat it.

Stories play an important role in tackling stigma. But for people from stigmatised communities, sharing a story is not straightforward. For our eighth Tackling Stigma Champion, we spoke with Andrew Wilson, Engagement and Advocacy Lead at the Weight Issues Network (WIN), about why he chose to share his story and what others can learn from the experience.

Stories are integral for tackling stigma. But they can also cause harm. Here, we discover the Ethical Storytelling Roadmap and seven practical strategies to ensure storytelling with stigmatised communities is ethical.

For many migrant communities from sub-Saharan Africa, HIV is layered with silence, stigma and fear. In those settings, standard public health messaging is not always enough. Resources need to be shaped in a way that speaks directly to the community. Collins Adu, a PhD candidate at the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydney, has developed a community-led HIV awareness brochure designed specifically for migrants from sub-Saharan African communities living in Australia.

Listening to patients is central to high-quality care. But listening isn’t just a personal skill. It’s also a system design choice. At an individual level, how structure conversations shapes whether patients feel safe, believed and respected. At an organisational level, whether insights are captured, analysed and acted on determines whether listening leads to change.

We spoke with Gillian Love, Assistant Professor in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. Her work spans abortion, fertility, parenthood, and trans inclusion in perinatal services. Her message is simple: stigma shapes whether people feel safe enough to seek treatment, and that can be life and death.

Noticing bias is only the first step. What matters is what happens next. This article explores five practical strategies, grounded in research, that can help interrupt implicit bias and reduce its impact on everyday healthcare interactions.

As part of our February focus on implicit bias, we spoke with Loren Brener, Professor at the Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH) and member of the Tackling Stigma team about implicit attitudes, how they differ from explicit beliefs, and why even well-intentioned healthcare workers can act in ways that don’t align with their stated values.

The release of the new Autistic Barbie has been met with a seemingly equal mix of enthusiasm and criticism. Here, Dr Timothy Broady from the Tackling Stigma team shares his views.

Following a sold-out event in 2024, the Tackling Stigma Conference will return on 23–24 November 2026 at UNSW Sydney.

A new article in drug policy and harm reduction magazine Filter has been published featuring research from the Tackling Stigma team.

To mark World AIDS Day, we spoke with Dr Bruce Agins, founder of the Southeast Asia Stigma Reduction Quality Improvement Learning Network. Drawing on four decades in HIV care, Bruce shares how quality improvement offers a practical, data driven way to reduce stigma and embed change across health systems.

Meet Tung Doan, Executive Director of Lighthouse Vietnam and member of the Southeast Asia Stigma Reduction QI Learning Network. Tung co created Vietnam’s first national HIV friendly service guidelines with policymakers and communities, helping reshape HIV care and reduce stigma in practice.

Stigma reduction campaigns are built on good intentions, but good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. If we want campaigns that actually reduce harm, we have to acknowledge how different audiences interpret these messages, how systems generate stigma, and how language and power shape the impact. Here’s how.