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Geriatric education. Part II: The effect of a well elderly program on medical student attitudes toward geriatric
R D Adelman1, S D Fields, R Jutagir
1Division of Geriatrics, Winthrop-University Hospital, Mineola, NY 11501.
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.