The triple lock of truth: A new framework for trustworthy health communications

News and Insights

The triple lock of truth: A new framework for trustworthy health communications

August 14, 2026

At a recent FINN Partners regional Health Leaders gathering in London, we opened a fireside chat by posing three questions to a room of clients and health communications leaders. How many of you have searched online for health information in the past month? Almost every hand went up. How many of you went first to a peer-reviewed journal? One hand - and it belonged to a scientist. How many of you checked the original source before accepting what you read? Barely more than that.

That gap says more about our industry than any survey could. The science has not changed. The journey to it has.

As we explored in our News to Views: The Future of Health Influence report, people increasingly do not simply consume health information; they experience it through emotion, identity and community. Health communication, therefore, has to work in the spaces where public understanding is actually being shaped, without losing the context and credibility that make the information worth trusting.

We put that question to two people who see it up close: Dr Ahmed Ezzat, a London-based surgeon and founder of Health Creator Leaders, and Ben Deighton, president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, which represents more than 10,000 journalists across 46 national and regional associations. What followed was a frank conversation about where health information actually travels now, and what that means for how health organisations earn attention responsibly.

Trust is not truth

Dr Ezzat traced the turning point to COVID-19, when public trust in institutions fractured, and the public stopped simply accepting information - they started demanding to understand it. Layer on AI, which now hands people an instant, sometimes wrong, interpretation of whatever they searched for, and the change is structural, not temporary. Patients arrive at his clinic no longer asking questions. They arrive, confirming what they already read.

The distinction both speakers kept returning to was trust versus truth. A confident creator with a large following earns trust. That is not the same as being right. As Deighton put it, journalism's core discipline - show, don't tell, source everything, correct what's wrong - is exactly the check that following-driven content usually skips.

That matters because digital platforms can create a confidence gap in which certainty travels further than expertise. As the News to Views discussion found, qualified experts operate in environments that reward simplicity, speed and conviction, even when responsible medicine demands caveats, nuance and uncertainty. The challenge is not simply getting credible voices into the feed; it is enabling credibility to compete for attention without stripping away the qualities that make it credible in the first place.

A science journalism industry running on empty

Deighton was blunt about the state of his profession: it is, in his words, "a code red situation." Advertising revenue has moved to platforms. Subscription models work for a narrow slice of specialist titles and nowhere near scale. Younger audiences are not reading news sites at all - they are on TikTok and YouTube, where credentialed doctors sit in the same feed as creators with no clinical training and a much louder voice.

The consequence is not just fewer journalists. It is a widening space that someone else fills. Corporate and institutional communications teams are increasingly stepping into it, which helps get science-adjacent information out faster but comes with an obvious conflict: an institution telling its own story will always be inclined to flatter its research and skate past its failings.

From follower count to specialism

Dr Ezzat's own pivot illustrates the opportunity. Health Creator Leaders was built around a deliberate move away from chasing followership toward building specialism and authority instead - a much slower, harder path, but a more durable one. Follower counts, he argued, are frequently a mirage: a large following can sit almost entirely outside a creator's home market, and it says nothing about whether the content is accurate.

The results are measurable. His current anti-vaping campaign, aimed primarily at parents rather than teenagers, has generated more than 500,000 organic views, thousands of comments, and dozens of reposts from other clinicians - funded through a single topic ambassador, not paid media. The campaign's goal is not virality for its own sake. It is legislative change, built on a reputable message from a credible source.

The triple lock of truth

The most useful idea to come out of the conversation was a framework, not a slogan. Call it the triple lock of truth: FINN Partners shapes the communications need and audience brief; a verified health creator from Health Creator Leaders brings the creator perspective and checks clinical accuracy; and the World Federation of Science Journalists provides an independent check on editorial rigour. Three different perspectives - communications, health expertise and journalism - working together before content reaches an audience.

This matters commercially as much as ethically. Outside the U.S. and New Zealand, pharmaceutical companies generally cannot communicate directly with the public. A grant to an independent, credible third-party body such as the World Federation - with no strings on editorial content - is a legitimate, compliant route to funding health journalism and creator content at scale. The funder gets reach. The public gets information vetted by two independent, accountable checkpoints rather than a single algorithm.

Turning the conversation into practice

This is not theoretical for FINN. We have seen it work through the African Media Trends Report, where the World Federation's network gave us direct access to on-the-ground journalists across the continent, and through workshops that bring scientists and journalists into the same room before a paper or a launch goes public, so coverage starts with context instead of a press release nobody has time to unpack.

For a health organisation sitting on a significant piece of scientific evidence months from publication, the mistake to avoid is treating publication day as the start of the communications plan. The narrative - who the audience is, which creators and journalists are credible partners, what the brief says and who signs off on it - needs to be built over months, not weeks.

What this means for health communicators

Three things stood out as practical next steps for any organisation navigating this shift. Define the audience before choosing the channel: clinicians and the public need fundamentally different levels of detail, and conflating them undermines both. Treat funding transparency as a trust asset, not a liability to be managed quietly - every speaker agreed that stating clearly who paid for what builds credibility rather than eroding it. And build verification into the plan from day one, not as a crisis response after something goes wrong.

The science, as Dr Ezzat put it, has not changed. What has changed is where people go to find it, who they believe once they get there, and how much work it now takes to ensure that trust and truth point in the same direction. That is the job in front of health communicators today - and it is one FINN, Health Creator Leaders and the World Federation of Science Journalists are tackling together.

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POSTED BY: Christopher Nial, Darren Jones