Medical students' attitudes toward the elderly

A study was designed to examine the relationship between students' attitudes, their willingness to work with elderly patients, and the impact of a geriatric rotation on a randomly selected subset of the group. A pretest/post-test design was used in which 148 third-year medical students completed a multidimensional questionnaire on two occasions eight weeks apart. Highly significant correlations were found between the expressed intention of the student to work with the elderly and positive feelings about previous professional contact (r = .26, P less than .001), previous personal contact (r = .17, P less than .002), belief that working with the elderly is rewarding (r = .30, P less than .0001), high degree of comfort in working with the elderly (r = .21, P less than .01), and positive stereotypes about the elderly (r = .14, P less than .05). Despite the students' positive rating of the geriatric rotation, multiple regression analysis indicated that the best predictor of an index of intentions to work with elderly patients on the post-test was this same index of intentions on the pretest (multiple r = .58, P less than .001). These findings, as well as the actual attitudes and stereotypes held by the students, have major implications for the planning and development of medical students' experiences in geriatrics.