Attitude of nurses, instructors and nursing students towards the care of elderly patients(A systematic review)

Introduction: Nurses, as nursing care providers, have a pivotal role and a unique role in effecting the quality of care. The attitude of nurses on their preference for working with elderly people and the quality of care provided to them is effective. This study aimed to investigate the attitude of nursing students and nurses towards the care of elderly people.  Method: To obtain articles on the attitude of nurses about the care of elderly people, the researchers first selected some keywords such as “attitude of nurses, nursing students, elderly and needs of elderly”. Then they tried to search these keywords  in some Persian language databases like ” SID, Magiran and IranMedex”. To find some English articles published between 2000-2018, the researchers also searched the keywords in some scientific databases like “ Scopus, Science Direct, Cochran library, Google Scholar, Ovid and PubMed”. Finally, based on the amount of articles related to search topics and include criteria, 24 related articles were selected and reviewed. Finding: Nurses’ and nursing students’ attitudes towards care of elderly people were positive, negative and neutral. Many variables were evaluated as effective factors on nurses’ attitude, such as age, gender, level of education and work experience. It seems that having a positive attitude toward aging has an important role in choosing nurses in nursing care. Conclusion: Since the knowledge of nurses in the field of aging is influential on the type of attitude and selecting their priority toward care of elderly patients, therefore, it is necessary to look at the education of elderly patient’s cognition in nursing education levels with more emphasis.