Trust in the healthcare system: review

Purpose. Many aspects of the health care system effective functioning depend on the level of trust in it. The purpose of this work is to study and summarize the research of native and foreign scientists on the topic of trust in the health care system in order to identify the context and methodological approaches to the study of trust. Materials and methods. The author used in the review the method of systematic review of publications based on strict criteria for selecting publications of individual homogeneous original studies. The search was carried out in the bibliographic databases PubMed, Google Scholar. The author included in the review articles that mentioned trust in the health system as part of their research objectives or questions. No reports published in peer-reviewed literature were analyzed. Results and discussion. There are three positions to consider trust from: trust in the personality of a medical worker (interpersonal); institutional trust in medical organizations; trust in the health care system as a whole (systemic). Several studies have looked at trust in the context of public trust in health care. Within the health care system, there are processes of transfer of trust from an individual to an institution and back. Institutional trust has a significant impact on the formation of interpersonal trust. No causal relationship has been established about the impact of trust on treatment outcomes, and patient distrust of healthcare providers can have detrimental health consequences. The degree of trust in the health care system is different in various categories of citizens. Conclusion. The review revealed that there is no sufficiently accurate, theoretically substantiated and empirically verified definition of trust; trust studies are scattered and built around different definitions. The terms are used interchangeably between studies with the same focus and are not clearly defined and distinct. A variety of tools used to measure trust, the use of different concepts, a significant variation in the choice of the subject and object of empirical research, different methodological foundations of research make it difficult to compare and generalize research data, therefore, for further understanding, study, assessment and conduct of empirical research, a theoretical basis of trust is needed.

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