The examination of the attitudes of the nursing home employees towards the old people in terms of socio-demographic variables: The case of İstanbul

This descriptive study was performed to examine the attitudes of the employees of the nursing homes towards the old people in terms of socio-demographic variables. The population consists of the employees with various job titles who work at Göztepe Semiha Şakir Nursing Home - Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Maltepe Nursing Home - Nursing and Rehabilitation Center and Prof. Dr. Fahrettin Kerim-Nilüfer Gökay Nursing Home - Nursing and Rehabilitation Center (N:348). No sampling was chosen for the study and instead, all employees who worked at the stated nursing and rehabilitation centers during the study period were tried to be accessed. 322 employees took part in the study in total. Kogan's Attitude Toward Old People Scale / Turkish Form in addition to the survey form were used as data collection instruments for the study. SPSS (Statistical Package For Social Science) 23.0 package software was used to analyze the accessed study data. The numbers, percentages, standard deviations, minimum and maximum values, averages, cronbach alfa coefficient, mann-whitney U test, kruskal-wallis H test and One-Sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test were used to evaluate the data. The average point of the nursing home employees based on Kogan Attitude Toward Old People Scale was 97,60; the minimum point was "60" while the maximum point was "128". This study result shows that the nursing home employees show positive attitude towards the old people. The association of concepts such as age and old age (compassion, depression, wisdom, mental deterioration and uselessness), the feeling of being satisfied for working with old people at the nursing home, the most frequently experienced problems when working with old individuals (extreme expectations from old people), the job title, the nursing home unit where the person works, the factors that affect the attitudes of the employees towards the old people who receive services from the institution (religious factors), the status of desire to work at an institution that serves old people in the future and the status of desire to look after the old individuals at home, the frequency of meeting with the old individual of the family face to face, the frequency of meeting the old individual(s) of the family by telephone, and the status of getting satisfaction from the social interactions with the old people are determined to be the variables that are effective on the attitudes of the nursing home employees towards the old people.