Attitudes to disability of Russian occupational therapy and nursing students

Positive student attitudes toward disability are essential to client-centred rehabilitation. Instilling such attitudes in students enrolled in the first occupational therapy (OT) and post-diploma nursing management (NM) courses in Russia was a key objective of the curriculum development team. The team's aim was to combat the traditional Russian attitude of pity, dependence and marginalization. To this end, the introductory classes were developed and taught by teachers from the All Russia Society of Disabled (ARSD). This paper examines the attitudes to disability in Russia and compares the attitudes of three groups of students. Students in the OT and NM programmes (n = 18) in Volgograd were compared to other nursing students in the same college (n = 21) and to nursing students in a Moscow medical school (n = 20). All completed the Scale of Attitudes Toward Disabled Persons (SADP). The Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U statistics revealed that students in the OT and NM programmes had significantly more positive scores (P = 0.01) than either of the other groups. This suggests that the strategies adopted by the curriculum team were successful in developing positive attitudes in students.