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Geriatric Education Part II: The Effect of a Well Elderly Program on Medical Student Attitudes toward Geriatric Patients
Author(s) -
Adelman Ronald D.,
Fields Suzanne D.,
Jutagir Rajendra
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
journal of the american geriatrics society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.992
H-Index - 232
eISSN - 1532-5415
pISSN - 0002-8614
DOI - 10.1111/j.1532-5415.1992.tb01998.x
Subject(s) - medicine , geriatrics , intervention (counseling) , semantic differential , repeated measures design , randomized controlled trial , medical school , scale (ratio) , gerontology , gerontological nursing , physical therapy , family medicine , nursing , medical education , psychiatry , psychology , statistics , physics , mathematics , developmental psychology , quantum mechanics
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.