5 83 Geriatric IPE for enhancing students’ interest in treating older people similar scores (3.86). Perhaps even with the most successful interventions, higher mean interest scores are unachievable. Third, it is possible that the lack of significant change is caused by the nature or the intervention. It was in a classroom setting with paper-based cases. Perhaps, working with standardized or real patients, would have led to different results. In our study, the only significant result was the decline in interest in treating children in the uniprofessional group. Earlier research has also found such trends in interest: downwards for children, upwards for older people, among both medical and nursing students (Briggs et al., 2006; Cleland et al., 2014; King et al., 2013; Vergouw, 2015). These trends are without interventions and happen just as a result of progression in students’ education. This emphasizes the importance of the usage of a control group, because students’ interests and preferences change over time. Besides interprofessional education, several other types of interventions have been studied aiming to increase students’ interest in older patients, such as ‘older adult mentor programs’, geriatric courses and home visits (Bailey & Sudha, 2022; Eleazer et al., 2009; Tullo et al., 2010). Tullo et al. (2010) describe that longer rather than shorter interventions, and interventions that involve healthy older adults instead of older patients in a clinical environment, are more likely to improve students’ attitudes towards older adults. Meiboom et al. (2018) emphasize a more rigorous and bigger curricular change instead of low impact discrete interventions to motivate students for the medical care for older patients. This study is subject to some limitations. First, due to a low response rate at T2, the study has a small sample size. Second, although the intervention was spread out over a longer period, it was relatively small (4 sessions). Third, we measured interest after one year, so it is possible that the intervention did influence students’ interest directly after, but this effect was not sustained. Maybe an intervention with more or longer sessions is necessary to make a change sustainable.
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