Trust in health care encounters and systems: a case study of British pensioners living in Spain

Research on trust in health care faces two enduring challenges. Firstly, there are conceptual ambiguities in distinguishing trust from related concepts, such as confidence or dependence. Second, the tacit understandings which underpin the ‘faith’ element of trust are difficult to explicate. A case study of British pensioners who have moved to Spain provides an opportunity to explore trust in a setting where they often have a choice of where to access health care (UK or Spain), and are therefore not in a state of dependence, and in which the ‘differences’ of a new field generates reflection on their tacit expectations of providers and systems. In accounting for decisions to use (or not to use) Spanish health care, British pensioners cited experiential knowledge of symbolic indicators of trustworthy institutions (they were hygienic, modern, efficient), which contributed to background confidence in the system, and interpersonal qualities of practitioners (respect for older people, embodied empathy and reciprocity) which evoked familiar relations, within which faith is implicit. In contrast, with limited recent access to the British system, their background confidence had been compromised by reports of poor performance, with few opportunities to rebuild the interrelational bases of trust.