Early Clinical Exposure to Geriatric Psychiatry and Medical Students’ Interest in Caring for Older Adults: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Autor: Petal S. Abdool, Chloe Leon, Trent Semeniuk, Klara Pokrzywko, Susana G. Torres-Platas, Tarek K. Rajji, Tricia Woo, Paul Blackburn, Soham Rej, Marouane Nassim, Marilyn Segal, Yara Moussa, N.P.Vasavan Nair, Karl J. Looper, Ghizlane Moussaoui, Michael Wilkins-Ho, Jess Friedland, Marie-Andrée Bruneau, Wayne Baici
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 27:745-751
ISSN: 1064-7481
Popis: Introduction We expect that in the next 25 years, the population aged older than 65 will nearly double in the Unites States and Canada and other developing countries alike. This age group will require an increased amount of health care with increasing psychiatric, cognitive and medical complexity. However, there are few new incoming doctors wishing to care for older adults as part of their general medical practice, or to specialize in geriatric psychiatry or geriatric medicine. We hypothesize that early clinical exposure to elderly patients’ care could increase students’ interest in caring for older adults during their future career. Methods We conducted a pragmatic medical education randomized controlled trial at the Jewish General Hospital and the Douglas Mental Health Institute, McGill University in Montreal, Canada. 3rd year Medical students undergoing their mandatory 16-week half-time clerkship rotation in psychiatry were randomized to the equivalent of 2-4 weeks full-time exposure to clinical geriatric psychiatry (n=84). The main outcome measured was change in “interest in caring for older adults as part of your future practice” at the end of the mandatory psychiatry clerkship rotation. The secondary outcomes were change in “interest in becoming a geriatric psychiatrist” and change in “comfort in working with geriatric patients and their families”. We compared the intervention and control groups for demographic and other potentially confounding variables using the Chi-Squared Test and we examined bivariate associations between exposure to geriatric psychiatry and interest in caring for older adults using Chi-Square and the Mann-Whitey-U tests. Results Being randomized to geriatric psychiatry exposure (n=44/84) was associated with increased “comfort in working with geriatric patients and their families” at a 16-week follow-up (χ2 (1) =3.9, p=0.05) but there was no significant association found between geriatric psychiatry exposure and change “in interest in caring for older adults” (χ2 (1) =0.3, p=0.6), or change in “interest in becoming a geriatric psychiatrist” (χ2 (1) =0.2, p=0.7). Conclusions The results of this pragmatic geriatric psychiatry education RCT suggest that exposing 3rd year medical students to 2-4 weeks of geriatric psychiatry did not increase their interest to care for older adults in their future medical career or did not make them want to become a geriatric psychiatrist. However, it did increase their comfort level in working with older adults and their families, an important established predictor in the literature for choosing a medical career with patients 65 years and over. We believe these RCT results will help inform the design of medical school curricula in preparation for an increasingly again population in America and worldwide. However, more research is necessary to decorticate and identify potential co-synergic variables that would inspire and increase medical students’ interest in caring for older adults as part of their future careers. This research was funded by This project was supported by Charitable Donations to the Jewish General Hospital, as well as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Fellowship Award. Dr. Rej is supported by a Fonds de Recherche Sante Quebec (FRQS) Clinician-Scientist Award and has investigator-initiated grant funding from Satellite Healthcare (dialysis company) for an unrelated project.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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