Geriatric Education Part II: The Effect of a Well Elderly Program on Medical Student Attitudes toward Geriatric Patients

To assess impact of exposure to healthy elderly on medical students' attitudes toward the elderly. Prospective, randomized, controlled intervention trial. Community‐based Well Elderly Program. 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. 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. Pre‐ and post‐rotation, students were given the Aging Semantic Differential (ASD), a validated geriatric attitudinal scale. 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. These results underscore the importance of exposure to healthy older people on effecting positive attitude changes among medical students on geriatrics rotations.