Abstract: On honesty and trust, gods and mortals: Gendered experiences of honesty and trust in patient-practitioner relationships (Issue 8, 2005)

Honesty and trust are crucial in patient-practitioner relationships. Gender also can exert a powerful influence on how patients experience health care. This article investigates the interplay of trust and honesty with gender, as lived by patients of primary health care practitioners in New Zealand. Research found that honesty was integral to patient trust across a range of primary health care providers and that gender was key in shaping both honesty and trust within patient-practitioner relationships. The research used the qualitative methodology of Memory-work and involved two groups of participants, one comprising five women, the other four men. The groups both met for five sessions, each session lasting at least three hours. Between them participants wrote 43 individual narratives (two absences) and generated more than 30 hours of recorded group work. Honesty emerged as a major theme for both the female and the male participants. There were three important similarities in how the women and men lived and understood honesty: the importance of the practitioner telling the truth, the ‘location’ of honesty in the practitioner as the other significant person in the consumer-provider relationship, and honesty being interpreted as a mark of respect for the individual patient. There were also fundamental differences between the women and the men relating to the importance of genuineness of health care providers and patients’ assessments of practitioner honesty. These insights provide a rich starting point for designing improvements to current health care practice that are valued by the patient, and respectful of gender differences in the needs and wants of individual consumers.

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