WHEN leaving hospital recently I was struck by the notice on the fresh brickwork: “The Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital NHS Trust.”

In the creation of this complex new institution, a great variety of bodies and groups had to trust each other. It was not merely the city — a city with a history of producing radicals and pioneers — and the young university whose medical faculty is still being created. The hospital’s success depends on many institutions, including the State itself, being able to rely on each other’s intelligent faith in humanity’s duty to cure and to heal. It depends on the trust of the whole community.

Trust can be difficult. We cannot always even hear, as the North Country actress Thora Hird once observed. She thought she was asking an elderly patient her name, but the patient thought Hird was asking what her illness was.

“Renal colic,” she said.

“That’s an odd name,” said Hird. “Renal colic, you must be French!”

They were all at sixes and sevens but both roared with laughter. To trust each other requires all the sensitive humanity we possess. Often the technical medical language is obscure, and those who study communication in hospitals deserve our gratitude. Conversation in a globalised health service can be complicated — hence, among other things, the popularity of Joy Parkinson’s manual for overseas staff in our contemporary NHS. Trust in the reliability of hospitals takes time to grow but is needed urgently in the new generation of hospitals.

One Sunday I was wheeled down the long corridors and through the lifts to join a score of others in the chapel.

I was handed a small, chunky, wooden cross from Africa. The celebrant was a priest who was also a nurse. Her address at the Eucharist revealed that she had recently returned from working with tsunami victims of different nationalities and faiths. She reminded us that we live in a suffering world and share the experience of underdeveloped nations unable to provide Western facilities.

On one of my corridor journeys I was pushed by my 12-year-old grandson, under the eye of the staff; you can’t start too young when learning about trust, and hospitals can be laboratories of trust.

Ancient hospitals have known generations of trust. The Great Hospital at Norwich founded in 1249 has an unbroken record of trust between different professions. Down the centuries people had doctored and nursed, cooked, cleaned, paid the wages, endowed funds for enlargement and rebuilding and heard those words “I was sick and you visited me”.

Founded by a bishop at home in London, Oxford, Rome and Paris, its post-Reformation friends included a leader of the Congregational Church, imprisoned for his views. Fortunately, he was released by Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, who wanted tolerance.

Two centuries later enlightened philanthropists were inspired to buy some of its land to found the first Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

The NHS is trust on a grand scale. It now has around a million staff — it is the country’s largest employer. Taxation and contributions through national insurance payments ensure that we all pay for each other — on the principle of the Good Samaritan.

But for all the legislative requirements of what Arch-bishop Temple called “the welfare state”, and for all the amazing technology and skills of contemporary hospitals, we still need the upholding presence of personal care. The long nights when illness feels hideous, and isolation and depression cloud the mind, make us all the more alert to those who bring that sense of wholeness which is medicine for the soul.

The Very Rev Alan Webster is Dean Emeritus of St Paul’s