Trust in doctors and hospitals has plummeted over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to survey results published in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday.
The share of U.S. adults reporting they trusted physicians and hospitals plunged from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and other institutions found.
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The trend stretched across all segments of society, although the scale of the decline varies by gender, race and other factors.
"We found that trust in physicians and hospitals decreased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic across all socio-demographic groups," Dr. Roy Perlis, director of the Boston-based Mass General Brigham hospital's Center for Quantitative Health, and colleagues wrote.
"During the COVID-19 pandemic, medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists," the authors wrote. "As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt."
This phenomenon has significant ramifications for health, the researchers wrote. Surveys of 443,455 respondents confirmed a correlation between trust and COVID-19 and influenza vaccination rates, for example. "These associations were not explained by political affiliation, nor fully accounted for by trust in science, suggesting some specificity for medicine per se," Perlis and colleagues wrote.
"Our results cannot establish causation, but in the context of prior studies documenting associations between physician trust and more positive health outcomes, they raise the possibility that the decrease in trust during the pandemic could have long-lasting public health implications," the journal article says.
The survey revealed different reasons for mistrust between demographic groups, the authors wrote. As such, campaigns to restore trust must be targeted to address specific concerns for different populations, the researchers conclude.