Friday 21 November 2025 | 13:05-14:35 

Format: Presentation

Stream: People

Part One: Taking Community Control of Complaints About Stigma in Health Care: The Case of HIV

Stigma is acknowledged as a fundamental cause of population health inequality and as eroding quality health care. Stigma towards people living with HIV undermines goals to eliminate HIV transmission. Consumer complaints are key means by which incidents of stigma becomes known to health systems. Complaints mechanisms should inform improvement in quality of services but are underutilised as a source of data, analysis and action for stigma reduction. Making a complaint can be onerous and further harmful for individuals and complaints often fail to generate change in practice, policies or systems. A new approach to managing complaints of stigma is to place control of the process in the hands of the affected community. In a community-university partnership, we have developed a new method of collecting information about HIV-related stigma in health care and using this information to support individual health, address workforce capacity and advocate for change at structural levels.

Carla Treloar University of New South Wales; Australia

Part Two:  Hearing From Everyone: Making Feedback Accessible for People With Disability

People with disability have a right to have their healthcare complaints and concerns heard and addressed. They also have the experience, knowledge and ideas to get the best solution to improve our services. This session will explore barriers encountered by people with disability when seeking to provide feedback about their healthcare experiences. Solutions trialled at Alfred Health will be described including increasing website accessibility, provision of accessible information about how to give feedback, introduction of new ways to give feedback and disability education for key staff. Changes to systems capturing feedback further amplifies the voice of people with disability by supporting the organisation to understand and take action on systemic issues across many areas.

Lisa Cameron Alfred Health; Australia

Part Three:  Co-Design In Youth Healthcare: Co-Authoring a Practice Guide for Adolescent and Young Adult Healthcare to Enhance Quality and Safety

Over six months in 2023, eight geographically and demographically diverse young people from 17-25 years of age were engaged by our team to co-author and co-design a health professional practice guide to improve quality and safe practices with this patient cohort. This engagement resulted in the publication of the Queensland Health endorsed Providing Safe and Quality Care to Young People: A Practice Guide to AYA Care, written by young people in partnership with Health (2023). This publication succeeded by elevating authentic practice guidance through young people’s lived experiences.

In this session, we would like to expand on and explore the topics of:

• Consumer engagement methods with young people


• Qualitative research methodology and the use of experience-based appreciative enquiries to support engagement and gather data


• What we heard, what we validated and what was championed through the publication


• Lessons learnt through co-design and working with consumers


• Why qualitative research and co-design in youth healthcare can lead to meaningful change in the health system.

Brianna McCoola Queensland Health; Australia