Geriatric interprofessional education for enhancing students' interest in treating older people

Interprofessional education is one of the interventions used to increase health care students' motivation for working with older patients. Previous research about such interventions has been conducted without the use of control groups and has given inconclusive results. The objective of the present curricular resource was: Does geriatric paper-based interprofessional education influence students' interest in treating older people? During a one-year period, undergraduate fourth-year medical and third-year nursing students wrote four health care plans for four different paper-based older patient cases. In the intervention group students were paired up in interprofessional couples. In the control group students made the assignment alone. Interest for working with older patients was measured on a 5-point Likert scale before and one year after the intervention. In both groups, no significant change was found. Before-interest score of the interprofessional group was relatively high (3.8) so the non-significant results may be due to a ceiling effect. Nursing students' interest in treating older people at the start of the research was higher than medical students' interest.