Key Priorities

Trust in health and medical expertise   

Trust in health and medical science shapes people’s support of and participation in research, where they go for health and medical information, whether they seek care, which advice they act on, and whether they take up vaccines and new treatments. Australians’ trust is generally strong, but it is unevenly held – thinnest among communities that have been excluded from, or poorly served by, health and medical research – and it must be continually earned.

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Trust is shaped by:

People’s experiences of health, research and government institutions, including across generations
The information environments where they form health judgements, including social media, search engines, AI assistants and community networks
Their resources, health literacy and access to culturally safe care
Their physical, mental and social health and wellbeing

Through its Trust Project, the Academy works to:

Measure trust and the role it plays in health behaviours
Consolidate the sector’s trustworthiness by strengthening research integrity and professional standards, and communicating evidence and uncertainty well
Build trusted relationships between researchers, health professionals, communities and policymakers
Convene research, health, industry and government stakeholders to facilitate a coordinated, system-wide response

AAHMS

Focus Areas

Trust is foundational to the success and credibility of health and medical research and systems, influencing the uptake of evidence-based advice and participation in research.
The Academy’s work on trust spans understanding trust, research integrity and impact, and data and artificial intelligence.

Measuring Trust

Survey and interview data about Australians’ stated levels of trust in HMS suggest that while this is generally high, it is vulnerable and shaped by an array of situational, individual and structural factors. Behaviours that are influenced by trust in HMS, including vaccination and information-seeking patterns, provide another lens through which to measure trust. The Academy’s evidence brief on measuring trust synthesizes opinion data and behavioural trends to provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of trust in health and medical expertise.

Information Resilience and Health

How people judge information and decide who to trust depends partly on their overall health. Prepared by AAHMS and the Australian Academy of Science for the National Science and Technology Council, this report finds that sleep, nutrition, physical activity and social connection can strengthen resilience to misinformation, positioning health alongside media literacy and platform regulation in Australia’s response.

Understanding Trust

The Academy’s policy explainer on trust in the health and medical sciences explores trust as a dynamic, multidimensional foundation for effective research, evidence-based care and public engagement. Trust enables participation in research, uptake of health advice, and resilience to misinformation, while declining trust undermines system performance and community confidence. This policy explainer identifies transparency, good communication, equity and institutional integrity as key drivers of trust, and highlights the need to strengthen these to support a robust, responsive health system.

Review of Human Tissue Laws

Every major advance in modern medicine rests on acts of public trust, which in many cases, is the decision to donate human tissue for research. The Academy has submitted two responses to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Review of Human Tissue Laws and the associated discussion paper, focusing on the use of human tissue for research purposes.

Trust in Health and Medicine

The Academy’s 2025 Annual Meeting brought national and international research, health, industry and policy leaders together with key decision-makers to explore the position of health within the contemporary political landscape, and scrutinise strategies to protect public policy, combat misinformation, and strengthen confidence in health and medical expertise.

International Scientific Collaboration

High-quality, reliable research is the foundation for a trustworthy health and medical sciences ecosystem and a trusted health system. At a time when 61% of people in Australia say that they worry about health and medical science becoming politicised, the Academy is committed to promoting the rigorous standards, transparency and oversight needed to ensure that research credibility, ethical conduct and public confidence remain strong.

Australia’s Data-Enabled Research Future

Technologies such as precision medicine and AI have transformative potential to streamline care delivery and improve health outcomes. By promoting responsible data stewardship, robust governance and ethical deployment, the Academy supports ethical integration of AI and health data into research and clinical practice in ways that enhance decision-making, protect privacy and deliver meaningful benefits for patients, clinicians, and the health system.

AI in Health

The Academy published a roundtable report ‘Artificial Intelligence in Health: Exploring the Opportunities and Challenges’ on 4 June 2020, which called for a national conversation on the future role of artificial intelligence in health in Australia. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already starting to transform healthcare and the Academy concluded that Australia must act now to set our own path through this new landscape.