By the time a new nurse, physician, or allied health professional walks through our doors, their attitudes toward older adults are largely already formed. Those attitudes were shaped years earlier in classrooms, clinical rotations, the informal culture of professional training, and lifetimes of personal experience long before we ever get a chance to onboard them. That makes research on health profession students less a curiosity and more a workforce forecast: it tells us something about what we’re inheriting. A cross-sectional study of 203 health profession students in Poland, offers exactly that kind of early read.
The Research
Kocur and colleagues surveyed 203 students across seven health-related fields of study at Polish universities (nursing, medicine, dentistry, midwifery, physiotherapy, paramedicine, and public health) between January and February 2025. These are, in other words, the pre-professional population: people who have chosen a health career path but have not yet entered the workforce as licensed practitioners. Respondents completed the Scale of Attitudes Towards Older Adults (SPWS), a standardized 60-item instrument rated on a 6-point Likert scale, producing three subscale scores: Respect and Support, Rejection and Lack of Understanding, and Social Distance. Interestingly enough, nursing students made up the largest single group (about 31% of the sample), notable given that nursing and nursing-adjacent roles are exactly where much of Kansas’s direct care and care-coordination workforce is drawn from. Researchers also tracked how field of study, sex, age, and frequency of contact with older adults predicted these attitude scores.
Research Findings
- Across the future workforce, attitudes leaned primarily positive. Respect and Support was the highest-scoring dimension (mean 4.49 out of 6), and Social Distance was low (mean 2.46). Given these results, one can infer that this cohort is entering the field wanting to keep older adults at arm’s length.
- But Rejection and Lack of Understanding, the subscale measuring irritation, lack of empathy, and a sense of older adults as burdensome, sat at a moderate and ambivalent level (mean 3.38 out of 6).
- Nursing students – arguably the single group most likely to become Kansas’s future direct care nurses, care coordinators, and frontline aging-services staff – scored significantly higher on Rejection and Lack of Understanding than dental students and paramedic students. In other words, among the future professionals surveyed, the group headed most directly toward sustained geriatric care work showed the most ambivalence in this regard, not the least.
- Frequency of contact with older adults during training was associated with higher Respect and Support but had no significant relationship with Rejection and Lack of Understanding or Social Distance. Put simply, clinical exposure during training-built respect but did not resolve the irritation-and-empathy-gap dimension, the dimension most predictive of burnout-adjacent disengagement once someone is actually on the floor.
- Women scored modestly higher than men on Rejection and Lack of Understanding, and age had no relationship with any attitude dimension. This finding indicates that it isn’t simply a matter of the youngest students needing more time to mature into the role.
Why Does This Matter for Kansas Providers?
s-sectional sample of Polish students. It is not a U.S. population, not Kansas-specific, and it is not able to establish that clinical exposure caused these attitude patterns rather than happening alongside them. The sample also skewed heavily nursing and heavily female, a limitation the authors themselves name. And these are students, not yet employees; how these attitudes translate once someone is drawing a paycheck and carrying a caseload is a separate question this study cannot and did not answer. All this to say, the data presented is not a direct forecast.
What’s worth Kansas providers’ attention, cautiously, is the shape of the pattern: the students with the most sustained exposure to dependent older patients during training, the ones on a nursing trajectory, were also the ones carrying the most ambivalence about older adults into their future careers. If something similar holds in U.S. communities, that has significant implications for recruitment and onboarding in Kansas aging services, where nursing and nursing-adjacent roles make up a substantial share of the workforce we’re trying to grow and retain.
It suggests that we may not be receiving a blank slate. We may be receiving people who already carry some fatigue or ambivalence formed during their training, not because they lack compassion, but because sustained exposure to frailty and dependency without structured support to process it tends to produce exactly this pattern.
This reframes onboarding from a purely orientation-and-competency exercise into something closer to an opportunity: new hires arriving from nursing and allied health pipelines may be a meaningful population to check in with early, not because they’re less committed, but because their training experience may already have shaped attitudes that are worth exploring and addressing before they progress on the job for better or for worse.
What Can You Do?
- Treat new hires from nursing and nursing-adjacent training pipelines as a distinct onboarding population, not just a credentialing category. Since this group showed the most ambivalence in the study, a standard orientation built around facility policy and competency checklists may not surface or address attitudes they’re already carrying in. Consider a low-stakes conversation early in onboarding – what did your clinical training teach you to expect from older patients, and what surprised or wore on you – before those attitudes calcify into workplace habits.
- Don’t assume clinical rotation hours are doing attitude-formation work on their own. The study found that contact built respect but left the irritation/empathy-gap dimension as-is. If your organization hosts nursing or allied health students for clinical placements, that’s an opportunity to intervene earlier in the pipeline. Consider pairing placement hours with structured debrief or reflection rather than assuming exposure alone is preparing them well.
- Build relationships with regional nursing and allied health programs, not just as a recruitment pipeline but as a place to influence how gerontological content and emotional preparation are taught before students ever apply for a job. The field-of-study gap in this study (nursing above dental and paramedic) suggests curriculum design and clinical exposure patterns, not innate disposition, are doing a lot of the work meaning they are well positioned to create positive change.
- If you’re evaluating new-hire satisfaction or early turnover, consider tracking whether attitudes toward older adults at hire (not just at six-month review) predict later disengagement. The study’s ambivalent-but-not-negative scores suggest this population may be more fragile than a fully positive attitude hire.
As always, none of this is a Kansas finding – it’s a Polish finding about the pre-professional pipeline, worth considering against what we see happening with new hires here. If your organization tracks attitudes or engagement data by professional background at time of hire, it may be worth a look at whether a similar pattern shows up locally.
