Stigma produces population health inequities through resource deprivation, social exclusion, and diminished access to care — yet it remains largely absent from mainstream social determinants of health frameworks and the policies designed to address them. This presentation introduces a novel classification framework that positions stigma as a social determinant of health and maps the policy landscape accordingly. Drawing on evidence across stigmatized conditions — including tobacco use, cancer, and other health-related identities — the talk examines how structural, interpersonal, and internalized stigma operate as upstream drivers of health inequity. Attendees will explore how this framework can inform more equitable health policy, clinical practice, and research, and will consider actionable strategies for advancing stigma-informed approaches in their own work.
Learning Objectives: After this webinar, attendees will be able to:
Articulate how stigma functions as a social determinant of health that produces population-level health inequities through distinct, identifiable mechanisms.
Apply the Stigma-as-Social-Determinant (SSD) Classification Framework to evaluate how current health policies address — or fail to address — stigma across conditions.
Identify at least two actionable strategies for integrating stigma-informed approaches into health policy, clinical practice, or research.
Speaker: Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM, is a behavioral scientist whose research program centers on tobacco-related stigma as a social determinant of health, lung cancer screening behavior, shared decision-making, and community-engaged implementation science. She is Director of the Cancer Prevention Precision Control Institute at Hackensack Meridian Health's Center for Discovery & Innovation and Professor at both Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and Georgetown University, where she also serves as Deputy Associate Director for Community Outreach & Engagement at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Carter-Bawa's research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and extramural funding from industry and other sponsors. She chairs the American Cancer Society National Lung Cancer Roundtable Stigma and Nihilism Task Group and has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. Her policy framework classifying stigma as a social determinant of health was recently published in the Milbank Quarterly.
Event start time: 12:00 pm
Event end time: 01:00 pm