Instead, too much regulation could be counter-productive, undermining the trust that should underpin the patient-health professional relationship.
In a recently published book Health Professionals and Trust: The Cure for Healthcare Law and Policy, Prof Henaghan says external regulation and surveillance may lead to compliance but such behaviour is not likely to be as enduring as a professional commitment to act in trustworthy ways.
There was no guarantee extra compliance groups would make healthcare professionals more trustworthy either, as the people involved with them could get things wrong or let their judgements be affected by bias or irrelevant matters.
"Healthcare professionals must either develop a strong professional commitment to creating a culture of trust, or face more and more external audits."
He would like to see healthcare law's function to be allowing for trust between health professionals and patients to thrive.
In an interview, Prof Henaghan said the way people behaved within any profession should be driven by an internal ethos about what was the right thing to do, rather than a reliance on external checks to ensure "you know what you are doing".
In health care, he considered trust was being lost, something which had partly been doctors' own fault.
If this erosion continued, there was a risk of healthcare turning into a mechanistic enterprise, controlled by management processes, rather than a humanistic relationship governed by trust and judgement.
Communication was the key to fostering trust and it was something which applied to doctors, other health professionals they were working with, and patients.
He agreed patients could have an unrealistic idea of what doctors were able to do and did not necessarily understand diagnosis was "an art, not science".
Doctors relied heavily on the patient to tell them everything they needed to know and that was difficult without a trusting relationship.
He welcomed the recently published consensus statement on the role of the doctor in New Zealand which advocated partnership with patients, rather than "the doctor knows best" approach.
Prof Henaghan said doctors were not going to get everything right, but it was important that complaints procedures did not result in public humiliation which could destroy their ability to trust themselves again. (He was not referring to those instances of deliberate wrong-doing on the part of health professionals.)
Doctors also needed to get better at apologising when they did make mistakes.
Making an apology was often seen as a failure, but done with the right spirit and not begrudgingly, it could be "very empowering".
People were also "amazingly good at forgiving" if an apology was done the right way.
The public needed to be able to trust health professionals would step forward in an emergency situation, even if they could not be 100% sure of the outcome.
In his book, he cited the instance of health professionals amputating a patient's legs in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake in a risky situation where they concluded the patient would have died without such intervention.
This action, which demonstrated empathy, compassion and respect for life, did not need external audit, but such an attitude should not be reserved for emergency situations.
"In order to be trusted, healthcare professionals should act with empathy, compassion and respect for life at all times. To further foster trust, they must also constantly equalise power between themselves and their patients."
A section of the book also deals with the issues of trust involved in medical research.
Ethics forms and scrutiny by ethics committees did not, in themselves, establish trust that was necessary for research to be truly fruitful and ethical.
Such trust could only be established by a frame of mind which treated those involved in the research as equals in every way.
Among the cases outlined in the book is that of gravely ill swine flu victim Allan Smith and the controversy around his family's wish to have him given intravenous vitamin C. The family succeeded, following the intervention of a lawyer. Mr Smith survived.
Prof Henaghan said even if there was no hard scientific evidence to show why Mr Smith had recovered, the fact he did showed there would be situations where healthcare professionals "holding fast to knowing it all" could put a patient at risk of death.
"A mind open to all possibilities, realising the limitations of its knowledge, is the best way for trust to be fostered."
Asked what impact he thought his book might have, Prof Henaghan said "probably people will say I'm naive, a Polyanna, and it doesn't work like this" and that he "must be mad".
However, he hoped it would prompt people to think afresh about the importance of trust in the health professional/patient relationship and that he had given enough "really good examples" of situations where people made brave and good decisions from a position of trust.