When we communicate about stigma, our instinct is often to correct what's wrong: challenge the stereotype, bust the myth, give people the facts. But what if repeating a stigmatising idea, even to correct it, actually helps make it stronger?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.