Trust, Trust Repair, and Public Health: A Scoping Review Protocol

State actors are key participants in population health, organizing, among other things, mandates and guidelines that target health behaviors and encourage the uptake of medicines, screenings, diagnostics, and control of health conditions. Effective implementation of these crucial, government-sponsored health efforts is conditional on the public’s belief that the state is trustworthy and has one's best interest in mind – positioning trust in government as a central determinant of public health.

Trusting relationships between patients, health systems, and health care providers are also essential, as high-quality, safe care and adherence with healthcare professionals’ recommendations heavily depend upon trust. In many countries, trust in government and health care providers are inseparable, as governments are the primary providers of healthcare. Despite these critical relationships, existing studies that link trust and public health outcomes often focus on contemporaneous factors, many of which are endogenous to public health outcomes (e.g., support for the incumbent political party).