Trust isn’t something we have – it’s something we do.
That was the heart of my recent talk (full text here), “Trust Is a Verb,” delivered at the annual meeting of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.
We live in an age when confidence in science and medicine feels fragile, not because people don’t care about truth, but because they want to be seen, heard, and included in how truth is made.
I spoke about:
Three shifts reshaping how people relate to health and evidence:
- Expertise is being reframed: lived experience and professional knowledge must meet as partners, not rivals.
- Conversations happen for speed, not understanding: we need to rebuild the boundaries that give dialogue meaning.
- The personalization promise: in a culture of “I matter,” we must reconnect personal experience with collective wellbeing.
And three actions to make trust a living practice again:
- Act in ways worthy of trust: transparency, empathy, and everyday integrity matter more than slogans.
- Renew the social contract across generations: listen across different expectations of expertise and authority.
- Reimagine how science and society walk forward together: rebuild the “middle layer” where evidence, experience, and values meet.
Trust doesn’t live in statements.
It lives in stitches: in how we show up, listen, and decide when things feel uncertain.