Abstract
The relationship between clients and their health care providers has an important impact on health promotion and disease prevention. Perhaps the most important element of patients' relationships with their health care providers is trust. Enhancing clients' trust in their health care provider has been shown to lead to greater adherence to medical advice, continuity of care, and better overall health outcomes. Pharmacists are beginning to take on the role of primary health care providers to meet the increasing need for affordable, quality medical care. As pharmacists begin to dispense medical advice as well as medicine, there is an increased need for research on the determinants of trust in the pharmacist-client relationship. In this article, we conduct in-depth interviews and a large-scale field survey to develop a social marketing campaign to increase clients' trust in their pharmacists. We implement the campaign through a randomized field experiment and find evidence that emphasizing relational benefits in the developing stages of the pharmacist–client relationship increases trust.