Healthcare encounters do not end when patients leave a consultation, ward, diagnostic setting, or digital interaction. Some encounters remain psychologically available as remembered experiences that influence what patients expect from subsequent care, how they interpret ambiguous clinician behaviour, which sources of information they trust, and whether they approach future healthcare with openness, vigilance, avoidance, or conditional engagement. Existing research has examined patient experience, trust, medical mistrust, communication, discrimination, institutional betrayal, continuity, and healthcare utilization, but these domains are rarely organized as components of a temporally explicit theory of remembered care. This conceptual article proposes that healthcare encounters become consequential for later engagement through selective encoding, reconstructive memory, anticipatory appraisal, target-specific trust updating, and context-dependent behavioural responses. Negative experiences may sometimes exert disproportionate influence, but such asymmetry is neither assumed to be universal nor reduced to a fixed psychological bias. Trust is treated as target-specific and potentially differentiated across individual clinicians, healthcare teams, institutions, and health systems. The proposed account further distinguishes disengagement from information avoidance, online substitution, delayed help-seeking, and selective re-engagement. Corrective experiences are conceptualized as potentially important but insufficient unless they address the relational or institutional meaning attached to an earlier rupture. The resulting healthcare-memory perspective is intended as a bounded, testable theoretical architecture rather than a claim that prior encounters causally determine future behaviour. It generates longitudinal hypotheses concerning persistence, updating, generalization, repair, and the conditions under which remembered healthcare experiences become durable components of relationships with care systems.
