In many countries, including Poland, a significant number of coronavirus infections occur in medical settings. As a result, a lowering in healthcare trust has been widely reported in terms of other illnesses and diseases not being looked at or treated—especially in a timely manner or at all [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Trust is crucial for the smooth functioning of complex systems, particularly in healthcare [6]. It is regarded as an effective tool for evaluating medical performance [7] [8] [9] [10] as well as of great importance to a well-functioning healthcare system. The study empirically evaluates the influence of information on trust in physicians, the medical profession, hospitals, and the payer—i.e., its main components. Consequently, the notion of restoring trust in healthcare as a result of the coronavirus pandemic or any other relating circumstance is vital to a healthy and viable society.
People’s trust with their physician and, generally, with a provider is vital to the care process. It can modify patient attitude and behavior which can result in better levels of treatment [11] [12] [13]. Trust can activate the placebo effect [14], increase acceptance of medical suggestions and compliance with treatment recommendations [15], diminish the risk of underusing medications in response to cost pressure [16] [17] [18], and improve motivation to seek help and use preventive care [8] [11]. Moreover, trust enhances communication between doctors and patients [19] [20] [21] as well as the perception of efficacy, self-reported health status [22] [23], well-being, and quality of life [5]. Changing attitudes and behaviors associated with patient trust also has a positive impact on healthcare providers. As such, trust in a provider may reduce the number of conflicts between patients and medical staff [22], diminish the probability of complaining about medical malpractice [24], lower transaction costs (e.g., expenditures that can decrease patient anxiety via additional diagnostic testing and physician consultation) [25] [22], and increase motivation to recommend the healthcare provider to others [22]. Trust improves the perception of the performance. Studies show that patients with high trust are more likely to perceive a performance positively even if it was objectively mediocre [19] [26] [21]. As a result, low institutional trust may cause inefficiency and undermine the legitimacy of health insurance and eventually decrease solidarity [27] as well as overall success of health policy [28]. Thus, an emphasis on the importance of research factors that may affect the level of trust in healthcare become seeming fundamental.
Although there is a rich body of knowledge about factors influencing trust in healthcare, a lack of quantitative research on how specific information is delivered—societally—exists. Understanding how information influences trust could have significant consequences, e.g., visiting a physician, the medical profession in general, hospitals, and the payer. Three points of should be considered: (1) can level of trust be influenced or even managed regardless of real healthcare performance; (2) ability to revise the data collected, analyzed, and conclusions drawn from them; and (3) action taken to increase trust as well as criteria of resources allocation in healthcare verified. Trust can be considered both as interpersonal, i.e., trust in a physician, as well as social, i.e., trust in a more abstract sense such as groups of people, institutions, and health systems [8] [29] [30] [31]. [32] claimed that interpersonal trust occurs when there is a possibility of repeated testing over time, i.e., to what extent a person is trustworthy. [33] suggested that a high level of trust in a physician cannot always be explained by evaluation of objective evidence of trustworthiness since it can also arise as a response to psychic distress created by illness. This means that in healthcare trust originates from the fundamental psychological attributes of seeking care in a state of anxiety, rather than from provider characteristics or patient personalities [8]. This is consistent with other suggestions that asymmetry of information between a patient and physician [34] in accordance with the logic of professionalism [35] forces patients to trust their doctor. A meta-analysis of 47 studies showed that the correlation between trust and health outcomes is small to moderate [36]. Specifically, trust is moderately correlated with self-rated subjective health outcomes, but there is no correlation between trust and objective as well as observer-rated outcomes [36].
Social trust can be influenced by patient experience and the general public’s view of the system [19] [32] [37]. Institutional trust in such organizations as hospitals, public payers, or insurers may be an indicator of consumer appreciation of the organization [27] and can be affected by varying degrees of interpersonal and social trust [38]. In particular, social trust may be influenced by patient experience, general public opinion [19] [32] [37], professional institutions and legal as well as regulatory protections [32], institutional guarantees, and government regulation of medical education, protection of patient rights, and healthcare quality supervision [39]. Importantly, these issues need to be conveyed to society as understandable as well as plausibly achievable. This is significant since [27] pointed out that low levels of trust are due to the fact that people may not fully comprehend how the healthcare system (e.g., health insurance) works and how money influences physicians and provider behavior. Moreover, they predict that political communication and mass media may play a central role in shaping public opinion, as “facts do matter less than the perception of the facts” [27]. In many countries, a low level of trust is directly correlated with the media, reporting on what goes wrong in healthcare [27] and why. In short, information is one of the critical factors that influences the level of trust in a healthcare system. [27] claimed that the central query of “whether better information will indeed translate in higher institutional trust” formulates the foundation of this research. This paper explores these queries in the context of Poland and its institutional trust in its medical profession, hospitals, and payer system as well as interpersonal trust at the physician-based level. A breakdown of the study is structured as follows: Sect. 2 frames the research method, Sect. 3 illustrates the results, and Sect. 4 elucidates a discussion and conclusion on healthcare trust in terms of real performance.