Without trust, people do not engage with health care providers, health plans, or life science companies….nor do many people accept “science fact.”

I explore the sad state of Trust and Health Care. published in the Medecision Liberate Health blog, with a positive and constructive call-to-action for health care industry stakeholders to consider in re-building this basic driver of well-being.

That is, trust as a determinant of health.

Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer came out in January 2022, coinciding as it annually does with the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Every year, WEF convenes the world’s biggest thinkers to wrestle with the world’s biggest challenges.

In 2022, entering Year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in health care is one of those big, thorny issues. Trust in health care sits at a historic low in several ways across many organizational types: especially government, media, and for some citizens of the world, even science.

Edelman detailed additional insights from the world’s health citizens on their levels of trust — in vaccines, in health care providers, with their employers, and with their fellow citizens as well.

The top 10 findings on trust and health are shown here from Edelman’s summary of the research into trust and health.

For the health care industry, we can:

  • Go local, because messages delivered closer to us in our geographic communities can be more trustworthy
  • Go via trusted voices for the citizen — through one’s faith based community, one’s favorite sports figure, pop culture faves, et. al.
  • Go via science and research evidence, which is still embraced by a plurality of health citizens
  • Embrace social determinants of health beyond medical care, to bolster factors that make health in communities — through food security, transportation, housing, education, financial wellness, and other factors that bolster well-being, and
  • Work through employers’ work settings….because our employers and “our CEOs” continue to be trusted authorities on health especially in the pandemic era

Read more on Trust and Health in the Medecision portal here.