Nursing Students Attitude Towards the Elderly: Literature Review The changing demographics in many of the populations in industrialized countries has changed the aggregate needs of the nursing workforce and this trend is expected to continue into the future as the population continues to age. One issue that has arisen is that the younger generation of nurses have demonstrated through various means that their preference for their nursing roles within organizations is not for working with the elderly patients. Therefore, a gap exists between the demand for nursing jobs that deal with elderly patients and the supply of nursing students that are willing to fill these positions. This article will look at two research efforts that try to focus on this precise trend and provide information about how this trend could possibly be reversed and finding a more optimal point in the supply and demand for nursing positions in the future.

One article starts with the assumption that it is mostly known that nursing students have little knowledge and interests for working with elderly patients in the Netherlands despite the fact that a majority of them will work with these patients after

In the Netherlands, a Bachelor of Nursing degree is a four-year educational program and during the total educational program, the amount of specific geriatric education was fourteen hours, including lectures, self-study and problem-based learning where students had to solve patient case descriptions (Bleijenberg, Jansen, & Schuurmans, 2012).
The researchers used a sample of nursing students in this population and gave them three different surveys to understand their knowledge about the aging population (FAQ), their attitudes towards older people (ASD), and a set of statements about elderly patients that they could agree or disagree with (OP) (Bleijenberg, Jansen, & Schuurmans, 2012). One of the key findings of this study is that first year students had a low knowledge of and preference for working with elderly patients and that four years of education had little effect on these rates. This study implies that a more focused educational intervention may be able to mitigate the skills and preference gap for the overall trend.

Another study focused on a population of nursing students in Israel and their readiness for a planned expansion in the capacity to treat geriatric patients (Haron, Levy, Albagli, Rotstein, & Riba, 2013). The situation in Israel mirrors that…