What would healthcare law and policy look like if it were driven by the central idea of establishing trust between healthcare professionals and their patients? This book attempts to answer this question. It does so by fi rst establishing why trust is important in healthcare relationships, and why it is currently under threat. It then turns to the philosophers to defi ne what trust is and how it can best be assured. The emergency situation, complaints pro cedure, relationships between health professionals and between health professionals and their patients and the families of sick children are analysed using trust as the guiding principle. The discovery of the human genome has led to new ways of working in medical research whereby gene mutations and markers are indicators of future health. Francis Collins, one of the discoverers of the human genome, has called the sequence of genes that make up our human genome ‘the language of God’ because of the beautiful symmetry of it all. 1 The perception that we may be ‘playing God’ by delving into the essence of our DNA has created the potential for distrust between healthcare researchers and their communities. Trust has been abused in this quest for new knowledge, particularly with regard to indigenous communities around the world. Yet trust is essential if we are going to use this new knowledge for the good of everyone. In order for healthcare systems to be trusted and more effective, the fi nal chapter shows they must be more equitable and accessible to all members of the particular society, not just those who can afford them.