Health professionals' attitudes toward older people and older patients: a systematic review.

Attitudes toward older people and older patients among healthcare professionals are of concern throughout the world, but there are no recent systematic reviews which have examined and compared the attitudes across the various healthcare professionals who provide healthcare to older people. A comprehensive literature search (2000-2011) was undertaken on electronic databases (CINAHL, MEDLINE, EMBASE, British Nursing Index, PsycINFO, Chinese Biomedical database, China Medical Academic Conference and China Academic Journal) using a combination of terms. We identified 2179 articles indexed with these terms. Initial screening was undertaken by two researchers and then checked by a third researcher. In total, the reviewers selected 117 articles which, on the basis of their abstracts, appeared to meet the criteria for inclusion. We obtained the full texts and two reviewers assessed each full text paper to further examine whether it met all the criteria. The final review identified 51 studies. Publications over the last 10 years show that attitudes towards older people and older patients range from neutral to positive among healthcare professionals and highlight the need for well-designed studies of both qualified and student healthcare professionals recruiting random samples across multiple sites and utilizing validated instruments consistently to permit comparison over time and across countries.