“What are we doing to be trustworthy?”

Tips on what not to say when you’re thinking about trust.

Trust in health care and public health captured a lot of attention during the pandemic, and it’s still going strong. When it comes to communication and patient education, there are things we can do related to trust, and I’m going to share a few of them with you in this episode.

Hi everybody, I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, and this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked #20 of Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences by Goodpods. Our online course, Equitable Patient Education, promotes high-quality clinical practice in patient education by helping prevent avoidable errors. Learners say, There's a lot of eye-opening information I hadn't considered before. For more information, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com. 

Now, you know there’s a trust problem in health care. Deloitte reports that 55% of the people they spoke to had a negative experience where they lost trust in a health care provider and 36% skipped or avoided care because they didn’t like the way that the health care provider or staff treated them.

So lots of people are working very hard on these issues, and you might be one of those people. I hope to add to this conversation from the perspective of communication and patient education because there are things we can do.

The focus on trust that came up during COVID, the explicit question was often, why don’t they trust us? And the answers came back loud and clear: historical discrimination, current discrimination. And a lot of people paid attention and heard these well-justified reasons. 

The focus was on the public for quite a while, though, specifically people who did not trust doctors, or vaccines, or the health care system, or public health messaging. And the focus kind of stayed on their feelings of mistrust. Interventions were focused on patients. And it didn’t take long for practitioners to kind of flag this and go, wait, hang on, this is not okay to just say, like, if we could fix their feelings, the problem would go away.

Looking outward is important. Looking at patients is essential, but it’s only part of the picture. And these same practitioners were insisting we can’t locate the problem just in other people. Externally, outside the health professions. We have to ask the question that someone asked in a meeting I was at, that is the title of this episode: “what are we doing to be trustworthy?”

This locates the problem inside. It flips the question. It’s a hard question to ask, focusing on our role, locating the problem and solution partly in us and in systems we’re a part of. One of the benefits of not locating the problem entirely out there is when we look for obstacles and opportunities internally, we can do something about it! 

And lots of people are. In 2022, there was a review of research on trust research that was in Health Affairs. And the authors said “the issue of trust has gained increasing attention in the past couple of years. We speculate that this is largely motivated by the COVID -19 pandemic, renewed emphasis on racial justice, and the increased proliferation of mis- and disinformation.”

And that study found a “growth in projects that aimed to address trust through specific interventions, striving for impact, instead of only documenting the problem.”

Another review