Trust in Hospitals-Evidence from India

Various explanations have been offered for outbursts of violence against doctors and other staff in India, drawing attention to growing supply-demand imbalance in healthcare, quality deterioration, overburdened doctors, weak security for medical staff, high expectations of patients who come in advanced stages of chronic and other illnesses, overcrowding of public hospitals with limited sanitary facilities. But underlying all these explanations is lack of trust in doctors and hospitals-especially public. Our focus here is on trust and its covariates over the period 2005-2012. The motivation stems from the fact that the existing evidence is patchy and scattered. Our aim, therefore, is to build on the empirical evidence through a systematic state-of-art analysis of trust in public and private hospitals and doctors. Combining our analysis with other evidence, we identify specific challenges to build patient-hospital trust and how these could be overcome