“Building Trust in our Community”

By Daisy Sherry, Family Nurse Practitioner

Bienvenidos! All are welcome here at Bolingbrook Christian Health Center!
We are here to serve our Bolingbrook community in love through providing excellent health care. Our patients’ health is so important. Our clinic is a safe space where we can treat health conditions, promote wellness, and care for the whole person---the physical, emotional, spiritual, and social needs. 

To help us promote this message and understand our patients better, we completed a research project in 2019-2020, funded by the Lewis University Lasallian Research Grant Program.  Trust is vital for people to seek out health care. At the same time, getting health care is valuable for positive health benefits. Our project’s purpose was to better understand the meaning of trust from our patients’ perspective, and learn about ways to build trust. We were fortunate to talk with 11 patients who received gift cards for their time and participation. Participants took photos to help us understand trust and together we discussed their ideas. 

From the discussions, we learned about 4 themes of trust that our participants described.  Trust was described as relationships, communication, faith, and caring.  We also discussed ways to develop trust between patients and providers. Participants suggested getting to know a person to develop trust, listen to people for understanding them, and treat them with care like family. Participants described trust as spiritual, providing comfort, and being non-judgmental. From these suggestions, we aim to learn, adapt, and spread the good word from our participants to all our clinic community. We are so grateful to our patients for participating and teaching us. We encourage patients to keep the conversation going. We will pledge to listen and do our best to earn your trust, and keep you safe and healthy.