82 Chapter 5 Table 5.2: Mean interest in treating different patient groups at T1 and T2 (paired t-test). UPE-group IPE-group Older adults n=31 n=29 T1 3.1 ±1.2 3.8 ±0.9 T2 3.5 ±1.0 3.8 ±1.0 p-value 0.076 0.873 Adults N=16** N=24** T1 4.4 ±0.6 4.3 ±0.9 T2 4.7 ±0.5 4.6 ±0.6 p-value 0.055 0.119 Children N=17** N=24** T1 4.1 ±1.1 3.8 ±1.0 T2 3.1 ±1.2 3.4 ±1.2 p-value 0.001* 0.067 The p-value of each paired t-test describes whether the difference between the scores at T1 and T2 within each group is significantly different. UPE=uniprofessional education, IPE=interprofessional education, T1=before the intervention, T2=one year after the intervention *p<0.05, **Not all students filled out the section about interest in treating adults and children, so the response rates between all questions differ. DISCUSSION In this study we found no significant change in interest in treating older patients before and after the intervention, in both the UPE- and IPE-groups. There are a few possible reasons for this lack of change. First, at T2 the proportion of nursing students differed between the UPE- and IPEgroup (39% in the UPE-group versus 66% in the IPE-group, p=0.044). We conducted further analyses to investigate the group characteristics. The nursing students were significantly younger than the medical students (19.4 versus 23.1 years, p<0.001), which caused the significant age difference between the groups. Also, the interest score at T1 differed between the nursing and medical students (3.8 versus 3.0, p=0.012). Consequently, the bigger proportion of nursing students was probably the reason of the higher interest score at T1 in the IPE-group. The differences between nursing and medical students must be taken into account in future research about interest in geriatrics. Second, the lack of change in interest in especially the IPE-group could have been caused by a ceiling effect. Hughes et al. (2008) also scored fourth year students’ attitudes towards older patients after a geriatric educational intervention and found
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