Trusting Each Other: Enhancing Trust in Health Care Relationships

Trusting patient-clinician relationships should be mutual. A patient may trust or mistrust a doctor, but a doctor may also trust or mistrust a patient. The vast majority of prior research on trust in health care has focused on understanding patient trust. Dr. Wynia’s project will focus on two areas that haven’t been studied nearly as much: (1) clinician trust in patients, including how that can help build reciprocal patient trust in the clinician, and (2) the roles of organizational and system policies and practices on building up or tearing down mutually-trusting relationships in health care.