Mental illness-related stigma, including that which exists in the healthcare system and among healthcare providers, creates serious barriers to access and quality care. It is also a major concern for healthcare practitioners themselves, both as a workplace culture issue and as a barrier for help seeking. This article provides an overview of the main barriers to access and quality care created by stigmatization in healthcare, a consideration of contributing factors, and a summary of Canadian-based research into promising practices and approaches to combatting stigma in healthcare environments.

Persons with mental illness and/or addictions have poorer health outcomes than the general population. Lower quality of healthcare has been identified as an important factor. A main contributor to lower quality of care for people with mental illnesses and/or addictions may be the cognitive implicit bias of mental versus physical care when assessing and categorizing a patient’s clinical presentation. The objective of this article is to highlight how this implicit cognitive bias of mental versus physical care can result in human factor risks to quality of care. We provide three specific case examples of where these quality concerns arise. We also propose the use of a new visual tool to help educate and create awareness of this implicit-bias-based risk and quality care problem.

Pandemic-related stressors exacerbate pre-existing mental health problems for some healthcare workers and cause others to experience problems for the first time. More resources have become available to prevent and reduce the severity of these problems. This article begins with a brief review of some of the current evidence of the problem and then outlines resources and strategies, some of which are based on the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (the Standard). The article describes a case study of the adoption of these resources to reduce stigma and improve resilience among healthcare providers. Finally, the article concludes with a call for more research which is needed to fully understand the effectiveness of these tools and resources in the context of the pandemic as well as additional tools and resources that may be needed.