Health Trust Initiative

Building Trust in Health

Trust in traditional health authorities and information is declining, while capabilities to create and spread false or misleading content are growing stronger. This is set against a backdrop of increasing skepticism in institutions, artificial intelligence reach, and disasters both natural and human-made. Allowing these trends to continue will have health and social ramifications that are increasingly dramatic, deep, and deadly.   

Against these currents, many trustworthy individuals and organizations act in physical and virtual communities with good intentions—but insufficient coordination, capacity, and community engagement. This results in duplicative content and capacity-building on some topics, scant support on other topics, and continual, costly reinvention of the wheel. It creates an environment that is not only inefficient and potentially inequitable but also works against trust building as well as positive behavior and policy impact.

Unifying this fragmented fleet requires engaging and empowering communities both physical and virtual to make pro-health choices, strengthening and elevating competencies of individuals and organizations that discuss health issues with these communities, and further enhancing capabilities of these messengers through cutting-edge research and tools. Supporting trustworthy messengers to drive positive health behaviors and outcomes requires that they listen and respond to their community needs, leverage existing resources efficiently, and learn effectively from a network of peers. Recognizing the diversity of sources that influence health behaviors and the variety of channels through which they communicate requires bringing together diverse and trustworthy communicators representing the public, private, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors both within and beyond the traditional health workforce.

The Health Trust Initiative is anchored on trustworthy messengers ready, willing, and able to support diverse populations and policymakers to make evidence-based decisions about health. To support this critical workforce, we will assess community needs, create an agile marketplace of content and capacity building, and promote an active collaborative network of multisectoral trustworthy messengers. Our marketplace of capacity-building, cutting-edge tools as well as ecosystem coordination mechanisms will ensure health communicators can more effectively, efficiently, and energetically engage communities in ways that build and maintain trust. In turn, communities will increasingly make decisions consistent with evidence-based guidance and their own health.

In an increasingly interconnected and complex world, lives and livelihoods depend on immediate access to accurate, actionable health information. The Health Trust Initiative will make all communities safer by facilitating effective, efficient, equitable health communications that protect diverse populations against false and misleading information, ultimately rebuilding public trust and advancing sound personal and policy choices.

The seed funding for the Health Trust Initiative is provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The initiative is co-led by Duke University and Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD. Planning efforts for the initiative included a Bellagio Convening on Building Trust in Public Health in late 2022.