• COVID-19
• capability
• health system
• continuous improvement
• management

Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) practices are important for women’s and men’s general health and well-being. Yet, some of the reproductive health services, such as abortion providers like Marie Stopes Australia (MSA), still experience stigma by association.

In this commentary, we show how an organisational response to crisis caused by COVID-19 turned out to be an opportunity to mitigate stigma. In particular, we explore how MSA established a Crisis Management Team (CMT) during the COVID-19 pandemic. CMT’s main role was to regularly update and manage how MSA addressed the risks associated with COVID-19. We show that it was CMT that triggered organisational change by building regular high-quality reciprocal relationships contributing to developing a sense of purpose and cohesion within the organisation. We argue that at the ecosystem level, an increased collaboration across the healthcare sector led to the recognition of the importance of services provided by other stakeholders—ultimately helping to challenge some expressions of stigma they previously faced. We develop the core idea of this commentary by drawing on a collaborative dialogue between a researcher and two members of the CMT as well as analysis of the documents that the organisation shared with the researcher.

In the following, we describe several internal and external changes such as constantly adjusting the way the services are provided in collaboration with other healthcare providers and suppliers; a transparent and frequent communication internally and externally and discuss how these changes helped to mitigate stigma by association in a way that was not anticipated.