Speech therapy and elderly people: a study of therapists' attitudes

This paper describes a survey of the attitudes of speech therapists towards working with elderly people. The findings are compared to those of similar studies of medical students and physiotherapists. A positive orientation towards the elderly was found to relate to the time spent working with older people, but not to the time since qualifying. The results indicate a marked increase in the amount of teaching and clinical experience received by speech therapy undergraduates, and demonstrates that training might not be influencing therapists' attitudes to the elderly. The implications of these findings on the services for the elderly are discussed.