(with thanks to Richard Fitton)
The current issue of the Journal of Communication in Healthcare is dedicated to 'the science of trust'. Below are extracts from the lead editorial.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17538068.2023.2281731
'The pandemic has unequivocally demonstrated that building trust is one of the core issues and priorities of our time, and that the global trust crisis in health and science information can no longer be ignored.'
'Major themes include:
'The importance of creating strong community ties, engaging local communities, and leveraging existing trusted sources of health information. Health interventions that go beyond information provision to foster personal and community connections, and are culturally and linguistically sensitive not only serve to build trust, but allow for the impact of the intervention to be more sustainable... Moreover, trust building often requires identifying existing trusted sources of information and leveraging these sources for health communication. Examples of trusted voices... include physician groups, schools, pharmacies, church representatives, friends, relatives, outdoor guides, LGBTQI + influencers, and women and youth groups...
'The need for a system-driven approach to address trust by identifying the interaction between drivers of trust/mistrust across different levels, dimensions, and groups. System thinking is about making sense of the complexity of any given issue by exploring the interactions between different elements of health and social systems, including the people, interventions, and policies that are part of such systems, and recognizing that observed outcomes are the result of a system and its interactions with determinants of health and well-being...
'The centrality of rigorous scholarship on understanding and addressing misinformation, which undermines trust in evidence-based health information and experts... Understanding the current health information ecosystem, including why and how misinformation spreads, is a critical part of tackling mistrust and fostering effective communication...
'The importance of community- and group-specific interventions. Several articles highlight the need for interventions that are attuned to the unique characteristics of the groups being engaged...
'Several emerging themes for future inquiry were also identified...'
Here are the titles of the papers:
A relationship-centered approach to addressing mistrust
Measuring trust across different dimensions and drivers: a working model
Lessons learned on building trust during a global pandemic: looking at future directions
Decentering trust to connect with criminal legal system-involved women in research
On trust and trustworthiness: listening to community leaders
The role of social media influencers as trusted messengers in tobacco control mass media campaigns
Transforming systems mistrust and poor communication to improve behavioural health care uptake among youth on probation
Trusted sources for COVID-19 testing and vaccination: lessons for future health communication
Covid-19 cure perceptions and media use in India
Trust as a dyadic mechanism of action: a call to explore patient-provider relationships in the twenty-first century
Trust in public health institutions moderates the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine discussion groups on Facebook
What generative AI means for trust in health communications
Use of the socio-ecological model to explore trusted sources of COVID-19 information in Black and Latinx communities in Michigan
Trust in science moderates the effects of high/low threat communication on psychological reactance to COVID-19-related public health messages
Trust and distrust toward online health information in nurse–patient communication and implications for eHealth literacy
Time to treat the climate and nature crisis as one indivisible global health emergency
Which factors influence the approach to shared decision-making among surgeons performing complex operations?
Expectancy violations and boundary management when giving birth during a pandemic: implications for supporting women
A relationship-centered approach to addressing mistrust
The full contents are available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ycih20/16/4
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
