ArticleSubstance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy2021
Perceived healthcare stigma among patients in opioid substitution treatment: a qualitative study.
Article in Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Depressive Symptoms and Anticipated Help-seeking Stigma as Mental Healthcare Navigation Barriers Among People Who Use Opioids.Community mental health journal · 2026Article
- Identifying Populations with High Opioid Use Disorder Public Stigma: Results from a Multi-State Survey.Community mental health journal · 2026Article
- Access to health and harm reduction services during drug decriminalization in British Columbia, Canada: a mixed-method study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Psychometric Properties of the Drug Stigma Scale Among Community Pharmacists Concerning Individuals Who Use Over-The-Counter Drugs.Neuropsychopharmacology reports · 2026Article
- The Socioeconomic Impact of Long-Acting Injectable Buprenorphine.ClinicoEconomics and outcomes research : CEOR · 2026Article
- Healthcare utilization and perceived substance use-related stigma from healthcare workers among incarcerated women with opioid use disorder.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- Identifying Stigma Phenotypes in Social Media Narratives of Substance Use: Observational Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Observational
- Barriers to bystander interventions in suspected opioid-associated out-of-hospital cardiac arrests: A multiple methods study of 9-1-1 calls.Resuscitation · 2025Article
- Beyond all-or-nothing: why binary thinking undermines harm reduction in addiction medicine.BJPsych open · 2025Article
- Mapping the lived experience of rural substance use stigma: A conceptual framework of salient attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in people who use drugs.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Breaking the vicious cycle of delayed healthcare seeking for people who use drugs.Harm reduction journal · 2025Article
- Associations between the Bolsa Familia conditional cash transfer programme and substance use disorder hospitalisations: a quasi-experimental study of the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort.The Lancet. Global health · 2025Article
- Article
- First case report of disseminated gonococcal arthritis in Newfoundland and Labrador.Access microbiology · 2025Article
- Psychosocial correlates of depression and anxiety among treatment-seeking individuals with opioid dependence: a cross-sectional study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Understanding MAT access in the context of unused MAT capacity in the United States: when increasing rural MAT capacity is not enough.Substance abuse treatment, prevention, and policy · 2024Observational
- Emergency department staff compassion is associated with lower fear of enacted stigma among patients with opioid use disorder.Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine · 2024Article
- Primary healthcare professionals' attitudes toward patients with current or previous drug use.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2024Article
- Are the self-stigma and perceived stigma of patients treated with methadone or buprenorphine still a problem fifty years after the marketing authorization for opioid agonist treatment? The observational STIGMA study.Addiction science & clinical practice · 2024Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundPeople with substance use disorders (SUD) including patients in opioid substitution treatment (OST) are subject to stigma, and have generally poor health and barriers towards seeking healthcare. Experience of stigma might negatively affect healthcare seeking, but this topic is sparsely investigated. The aim of this study was to explore OST patients' past and present experiences of substance use stigma in healthcare settings, in order to provide insight into the challenges that people with opioid use disorder may face when using health services, and the strategies they use to cope with them.
methodsSix focus groups with 23 OST patients were moderated by OST staff, and conducted with a questioning route focusing on health literacy. Experiences associated with stigma and its consequences that were spontaneously brought up by participants were assessed in a secondary analysis using a thematic approach.
resultsExperiences of stigma from a wide range of healthcare settings were reported. Medical records and patients' oral information regarding substance use, OST medication or hepatitis C infection were identified as circumstances bringing unwanted attention to the SUD. Participants reported various forms of poor treatment, believed to reflect views of people with SUD as morally culpable, intimidating, curious, untrustworthy and less valuable than other patients, sometimes with tangible effects on the quality of healthcare. Stigma in healthcare settings affected healthcare seeking behaviors, and could result in patients concealing their OST status or substance use history.
conclusionThis study highlights several aspects of perceived healthcare stigma that can shed light on difficulties that OST patients might experience when navigating the healthcare system. The results implicate a need to investigate attitudes towards OST patients, and the aptitude to deal with patients with SUD, among healthcare professionals, as well as a need for interventions addressing knowledge deficits and issues tied to values and patient reception among healthcare staff.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.