About half of all nursing students in a recent analysis said they were willing to provide care for older adults.
The report was published Monday in BMC Geriatrics.
A total of 68 medium- and high-quality studies were reviewed; most of them were based in China. Of the 30,328 students included in the data, 49% said they were willing to care for older people.
Four factors were linked with a student’s willingness to care for older people: experience living with older people, experience caring for older people in the past, prioritizing nursing as their first-choice career, and being in their third or fourth year of nursing education..
“The present study can serve as a resource for policymakers to increase the willingness of nursing students to participate in caring for older people,” the authors wrote.
A nursing student’s willingness to participate in caring for older people as a career is still relatively low due to the perceived low degree of specialization, expected high level of labor involved and the lack of recognition that comes with caring for older people, the authors wrote.
More nurses willing to work with older adults could be welcome news for older adults and their families who may be concerned about nursing shortages. According to United Nations data in the report, 771 million people worldwide are now 65 years or older, a number triple what it was in 1980. The number of older adults is expected to hit 994 million people by 2030 and increase to 1.6 billion by 2050.
Even though the study gives some data on how many nurses may be willing to work with the geriatric population, it doesn’t say how many definitely will go into that career field.
“There remains a critical need for more high-quality studies with representative samples to further validate these findings,” the authors wrote. They called for more insight to better understand the attitudes of nurses, especially studies that would home in on the factors that make a nursing student more apt to focus on geriatric nursing.
The news comes as a study published in July in JAMA Network Open found that nurses reported better working conditions in 2023 compared with 2022, but those working in long-term care and geriatric care settings said they had ongoing workplace concerns.
