Tackling Stigma Conference

Overcoming stigma as a barrier to healthcare.

Tackling Stigma Conference will focus on cross cutting approaches to understanding and addressing stigma, promote conversations and debate regarding systemic and structural issues that contribute to experiences of stigma in health care settings, and discuss novel strategies to overcome stigma as a barrier to health care. Along with international and domestic keynote speakers, concurrent presentation sessions, a speed networking event, and an evening function, the conference will have a panel discussion that will include people with lived experience and cover a range of issues which address intersectional stigma and how that impacts health care access and uptake.

• Call for abstracts to open March 2024.
• Registration fees: $360 early bird; $320 student; $420 full

Proposed conference topics and themes

• Barriers to health care, including experiences of stigma in other settings
• Lived experience of health care, including experiences of stigma, experiences of high-quality health care, reflections on what health care should look like
• How stigma towards specific behaviours and conditions intersects with other forms of discrimination, such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and others
• Research on how stigma manifests in a variety of health care settings and towards a variety of features of identity, behaviours and conditions, including blood-borne viruses, sexually transmissible infections, mental health, alcohol and other drugs, gender and sexuality diversity, among others
• Stigma and discrimination in health care policy and practice
• Identifying and responding to the role that power relations play in producing and perpetuating stigma
• Silence, obvious blind spots, and major gaps in stigma reduction policies and practices
• Innovative strategies, programs, or interventions to reduce stigma, promote inclusion in health care settings, and/or overcome other barriers to health care particularly peer-led models of care
• Other strategies, programs, or interventions to promote high-quality care, inclusive care, gender-affirming care, trauma-informed care, and stigma-sensitive practice

We have provided the above topics as a guide only. We will welcome abstracts that more broadly fit within our conference theme of tackling stigma within health care and improving quality of health care provided to priority populations affected by blood-borne viruses and sexually transmissible infections, including people who inject drugs, people who use alcohol and other drugs, men who have sex with men, sex workers, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, people with lived experience of incarceration, LGBTQ+ communities, among others.

We are also interested in cross-cutting and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and addressing stigma. To begin to move beyond siloed approaches to stigma reduction, and in recognition of the significant work that has been done on mental health stigma including the impending launch of the National Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Strategy by the National Mental Health Commission, we invite people working to address mental health stigma to submit abstracts on their work.