Shaping the Conditions for Care: The Impact on Trust
Trust, like care, thrives in environments where people are in relationship with each other, feeling both seen and heard - so just as industrial healthcare can limit the likelihood of care, it can also erode trust.
In this Town Hall, we will hear 3 care activists talk about what they’ve learned about how trust is established and broken, and approaches they suggest to enhance trust in healthcare.
Our panelists represent some unique healthcare communities and you can read more about them in the bios below.
Meet our panelists
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Carolyn Canfield, independent citizen-patient and Adjunct Professor, Department of Family Practice, Faculty of Medicine, the University of British Columbia - carolyn.canfield@ubc.ca
After her husband’s death from poor medical care in 2008, Carolyn has strived to advance collaborative patient and community partnerships in all facets of healthcare systems, including research, health professions education, practice improvement, services design, implementation and evaluation, policy development, and governance across healthcare systems in British Columbia, in Canada and internationally. Awards include Canada's first Patient Safety Champion; Canada’s first medical faculty appointment of a patient without professional credentials; Certificate of Merit for teaching from the Canadian Association for Medical Education; honorary lifetime membership in the international Resilient Health Care Society. Co-founder of Canada’s only independent peer-led community of practice: the Patient Advisors Network.
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Erin O’Malley joined the Coalition for Trust in Health & Science (CTHS) in January 2024. In this role, she leads the daily advancement of CTHS’ mission, vision, and values, and works with the CTHS Board to develop and execute strategies for continued growth of the organization. Prior to joining CTHS, O’Malley served as senior director of policy at America’s Essential Hospitals. She oversaw all federal public policy initiatives to protect essential hospitals’ interests and support their mission to provide equitable care to all. Her focus included policy development and analysis, regulatory advocacy, and safety net financing.
She has two decades of experience in health policy and has deep expertise in strategic planning, public-private partnerships, advocacy initiatives, and public health campaigns. While serving as a health policy consultant, O’Malley designed and executed legislative and regulatory health policy initiatives and advised clients on policy issues impacting their communities and businesses. She started her health policy career at the American Hospital Association where she served as a project manager on the public policy team and was instrumental in supporting and developing the association’s health care reform policy platform.
O’Malley holds a master’s degree in legislative affairs from The George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in public communications from American University.
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Gary Schwitzer has specialized in health care journalism for more than 50 years in his career in radio, television, interactive multimedia, web publishing and academia. While now retired, he still publishes a popular Substack. He was the founder of HealthNewsReview.org, which published daily reviews of health care journalism for 16 years. The site also produced a toolkit of tips and resources to help journalists and the general public to improve their critical thinking about health care interventions.
In 2014, the American Medical Writers Association honored him with the McGovern Award for preeminent contributions to medical communication.
He has an Adjunct Associate Professor appointment in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. From 2001-2010 he was on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, teaching health journalism and media ethics.
In 2000, he was the founding Editor-In-Chief of the MayoClinic.com consumer health web site.
During the 1990s, Gary produced groundbreaking shared decision-making videos for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making based at Dartmouth College.
In the ’80s, he worked for four years at the National Office of the American Heart Association in Dallas.
From 1973-1990 he worked in television news in Milwaukee, Dallas, and for CNN in Dallas and Atlanta.
He served two terms as a member of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists for whom he authored the organization’s Statement of Principles. For that organization he also wrote a guide on how to report on medical research studies.
Schwitzer has written about the state of health journalism in JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, the World Health Organization bulletin, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, The BMJ, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS Medicine, Nieman Reports, Quill, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter.org, The Daily Beast, The American Editor, and MayoClinic.com. In 2009, the Kaiser Family Foundation published his white paper on “The State of US Health Journalism.”
He has taught health journalism workshops for the NIH Medicine in the Media series, at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT Medical Evidence boot camps, at Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) national conferences, at AHCJ chapters in NY, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and at National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshops in Rio de Janeiro, Guadalajara, San Juan, Beijing. and in New Delhi and Mumbai, India.
He gave a keynote address at the International Shared Decision Making conference in Lima, Peru in 2013 and delivered a plenary address at the National Medicines Symposium in Brisbane, Australia in 2014. In 2015 and 2016, he spoke at the 3rd and 4th annual Preventing Overdiagnosis conferences in Washington, DC and in Barcelona.
September 30, 2025, 10:30a-12:00p ET, on Zoom
Will be recorded. Register to receive access to recording
Recommended Media
In advance of us gathering, we’ve collected some media recommendations.
Conceptualizing and Measuring Trust, Mistrust, and Distrust: Implications for Advancing Health Equity and Building Trustworthiness (recommended by Victor Montori)
Trust: The Foundation of Health Systems (recommended by Carolyn Canfield)
Writing about health care interventions? The HealthNewsReview criteria are as relevant as ever (recommended by Gary Schwitzer)
Listening our way back to trust (recommended by Erin O’Malley)
Why Should I Trust You? Podcast - May 8 episode (recommended by Erin O’Malley)