wisely when it comes to trusting health care professionals. In other words, if patients are
to trust, they need to trust health care professionals to have the knowledge and skills
necessary to provide safe, appropriate and competent health care. This requires that to
be trustworthy health care professionals must ensure they retain the appropriate
knowledge and skills and must not, for example, allow their knowledge to become out
of date or allow their skills to deteriorate; these things require self knowledge and self
awareness. Failure in either respect is to betray the trust invested in the individual acting
in the role ofhealth care professional. It requires a certain humility and open-
mindedness which I take to be part of a good will towards others (that is, to be part of
what it means to be trustworthy), for to allow one’s knowledge to be insufficient or out
of date, and to allow one’s skills to become less than competent is to show a lack of
good will towards patients, or in Potter’s terms, a lack of regard for the good of others.
Ui) That we develop sensitivity to the particularities of others
In her third requirement Potter suggests an essential component of full trustworthiness
is the need to understand, from the perspective of the trusting person, the meaning and
value of what it is they are entrusting. This requires both the epistemic effort of
identifying the biases in one’s assumed trustworthiness and of recognising that the
trusting person is more than merely a member of a specific social or cultural group. It
requires an attempt to grasp the significance for that particular individual of allowing
others to be in a position to harm whatever it is they have entrusted. Thus, for nurses, a
lack of sensitivity to the particularity of others would be demonstrated by treating
patients merely as routine cases of a particular ailment, and referring to them (as was
common practice in the 1960s) as, for example, the appendicectomy in bed five. Talking
and thinking about persons in this way has been discredited (although vestiges of the
practice remain in some areas) because it fails to recognise that, despite common
features of conditions, individuals react both physically and emotionally in different
ways to illness. The significance of a leg amputation is likely to be different for a
footballer than for a bank clerk (although neither will find it trivial) and this is because
of their particular circumstances. Developing a sensitivity to the particularities of others
assists in aiming for the mean in being trustworthy. Without it there is a risk of failing
to be trustworthy by acting in ways that neglect the importance to the trustee of that
which they have entrusted (and we may do this either by not meeting or by exceeding
the requirements of full trustworthiness).
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