Geriatric education. Part II: The effect of a well elderly program on medical student attitudes toward geriatric patients. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • OBJECTIVE: To assess impact of exposure to healthy elderly on medical students' attitudes toward the elderly. DESIGN: Prospective, randomized, controlled intervention trial. SETTING: Community-based Well Elderly Program. PARTICIPANTS: Ninety-three fourth year medical students on a required Geriatric Medicine clerkship who were assigned to either a tertiary care university medical center or a teaching nursing home. INTERVENTION: Thirty-five students were randomly assigned to participate in a Well Elderly Program and were compared to a control group of 58 students at equivalent sites who did not participate. MEASUREMENTS: Pre- and post-rotation, students were given the Aging Semantic Differential (ASD), a validated geriatric attitudinal scale. MAIN RESULTS: By repeated measures analysis of variance, the difference between pre- and post-rotation ASD scores were most significant for students who participated in the Well Elderly Program; site did not exert a significant interaction effect. CONCLUSION: These results underscore the importance of exposure to healthy older people on effecting positive attitude changes among medical students on geriatrics rotations.

publication date

  • September 1, 1992

Research

keywords

  • Aged
  • Attitude of Health Personnel
  • Clinical Clerkship
  • Geriatrics
  • Students, Medical

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0026730306

PubMed ID

  • 1512396

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 40

issue

  • 9