@AAHMS: Thinking about trust, a year on

Last night I was a very large face on a very large screen in Sydney.

At 7:35 pm Boston time, while the room at the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences was on its first coffee, I joined Lyndal Byford, Julie Leask AO and our chair Catherine Luckin for a panel on where trust in health and medicine stands, a year after my keynote “Trust is a verb”.

I came away convinced of something I had half known. Words like “misinformed” and “mistrustful” tell us a lot about the public and very little about ourselves. Julie reminded us that trust is one factor among many in what people do about their health. Lyndal showed how much care goes into the way science gets reported.

I’ve written up what I said, what I learned from them, and what gives me hope.

Thank you to Catherine Luckin, Ruby Guyatt, PhD and the AAHMS org team for having me back, and for excellent time-zone diplomacy.