A cross-sectional study: exploring knowledge and attitude of medical and nursing students to Care for Elders in the future

BACKGROUND: All societies are going through a longevity revolution. Inflating the elderly’s age group will present many challenges to the healthcare system. A better health workforce is needed to meet this demand. Little is known about the knowledge and attitude of medical and nursing students toward geriatric care in Saudi Arabia. This study aims to explore medical and nursing students’ knowledge about aging, and their attitude toward caring for older adults. METHOD: A cross-sectional study using two surveys: the fact on aging quiz to assess knowledge and the UCLA geriatric attitude scale to evaluate attitudes. A total of 494 medical and nursing students from three universities in Saudi Arabia were included. RESULTS: Knowledge and attitude scores were 13.57/23 and 3.37/5, respectively. Findings showed that even in a country where the elderly are respected and family bonds are valued there is still much room for improvement. Moreover, there was a significant statistical difference in the knowledge and attitude scores (p < .0001) regarding the participants’ specialty. The nursing participants had higher knowledge scores, while the medical participants had better attitude scores. Overall, Spearman’s correlation coefficient between ranked knowledge and attitude scores was −.339 with a significance of p < .0001, indicating a low negative correlation between the two scores. CONCLUSION: Knowledge and attitude score were fair to moderate, these findings propose enhancing learners’ education and training experiences in the care of the elderly through curricular improvements. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-022-03551-0.