Bringing Trust Building to Life Within Health Policy-Making Comment on “Placing Trust at the Heart of Health Policy and Systems”

Abstract

Public trust is crucial for health policy-making as it is closely linked to public participation and policy-makers’ legitimacy. While we have witnessed increasing interest in issues of public trust, especially since COVID-19, we argue that efforts should be made to deeply integrate the concept of public trust into health policy-making from the design to the implementation, assessment, and evaluation processes across the public health and medical domains. We propose four key aspects to consider for building public trust in the healthcare system, which have emerged from our past and ongoing health policy research on public trust: to understand trust before aiming to build trust; to provide tailored guidance on trust building in health policy; to develop trust performance indicators to assess trust interventions; and to implement targeted communication strategies.