The Stigma-Free Standard
A universal precautions approach to blood-borne virus and STI-related stigma in healthcare
Stigma associated with blood-borne viruses continues to have negative health and social impacts for affected communities. The Stigma-Free Standard is a toolkit of interventions, designed to raise awareness of stigma in healthcare settings, as well as providing concrete actions that can help to reduce the negative impacts of stigma.
2024-2026
Carla Treloar, Mark Stoové, Kate Seear, Virginia Wiseman, Elena Cama, Amy Kirwan, Caitlin Douglass, Adrian Farrugia, Emily Lenton, Gemma Nourse, Caroline Watts, Robert Monaghan, Emma Pagett
Led by Professor Carla Treloar (Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW), the toolkit is informed by qualitative research led at ARCSHS by Gemma Nourse and Emily Lenton with expert stakeholders, and by co-design workshops led by the Burnet Institute.
The Stigma-Free Standard will be trialled and evaluated across five health services in New South Wales and Victoria in 2025-2026.
The project outputs to date include three peer-reviewed articles, presentations at national and international conferences and online forums.
The results from this multi-institutional collaboration will be a world-first approach to stigma reduction that provides a scalable and sustainable framework for health systems.
Associated publications
Health‐related stigma: The affordances of electronic health management systems in the production of structural stigma
Emily Lenton, Kate Seear, Adrian Farrugia, Chris Lemoh, Elena Cama, Gemma Nourse, Carla Treloar
Stigmatising space-times: Addressing healthcare stigma beyond interpersonal interactions
Gemma Nourse, Adrian Farrugia, Kate Seear, Emily Lenton, Elena Cama, Carla Treloar
A universal precautions approach to reducing stigma in health care: getting beyond HIV-specific stigma
Carla Treloar, Elena Cama, Kari Lancaster, Loren Brener, Timothy R. Broady, Aaron Cogle, Darryl O’Donnell
Partners and funding
This project, funded by the federal government’s Blood Borne Viruses (BBV) and Sexually Transmissible Infections (STI) Research Program is led by Professor Carla Treloar (CSRH, UNSW) and involves a range of collaborators.