Medical care for the elderly: attitudes of medical caregivers

Attitudes of medical caregivers toward treating the elderly were defined in reference to two aspects of quality of care: the technical and the psychosocial aspects. The correlation between these aspects was assessed using samples of first-year and third-year students, interns, and MDs who had graduated two or four years previously. Socioeconomic background and orientational characteristics were also entered in an elementary structural model predicting attitudes toward treating elderly patients. The results clearly indicated that the two aspects of attitudes toward treating elderly persons were so highly correlated that only one dimension defined these attitudes, except in the case of first-year students. Furthermore, only two orientational characteristics consistently explained these attitudes throughout the five groups, while background characteristics were excluded from the model in the graduate MD group. These results suggest that studies of the determinants of medical student attitudes toward treating the elderly should test for the number of dimensions before estimating the effect of a set of predictors.