Thinking about Stigma in Housing, Health and Social Care Delivery

The first year of the Intersectional Stigma of Place-Based Ageing (ISPA) project focused on conducting a full evidence review of the academic literature around place, age and disability, exploring and understanding stigma. This briefing shows how stigma can lead to increased barriers to services, exclusion, and negative experiences, particularly for older and disabled people.

This document aims to extract the key points for housing, health and social care practitioners specifically to show the power of stigma, its impact on older and disabled people and recommendations for how it can be tackled within policy and practice.

It shows that people can be impacted by stigma in different ways (intersectional stigma) particularly across age, disability and place, and details how stigma is often intensified for excluded groups and is particularly important to the lived experiences of older people and disabled people. The briefing also shows that inclusive design is a key part of helping older people and disabled people to feel included.